April 27, 2022
ISSUE #
22

Three's a crowd

New updates and improvements to Herald's API.

Our third BOP product

This week we launched another Business Owners Policy (BOP) product. This integration brings our number of supported BOP products up to three. In the process of adding this BOP product we added support for over 470 classes of business including electricians, plumbers, painters, and many others.

Expanded BOP coverage values

This week we expanded the acceptable range of inputs for certain BOP coverage parameters. In particular, we now allow distributors to request zero ($0) for both the building limit and the business personal property limit when making BOP requests.

(Even more) granular industry mapping

Herald uses a very granular set of industry descriptions in order to map our standard industry taxonomy to the variety of taxonomies that our carrier partners use. In particular we use the “Index Entries” from the NAICS classification system, which offer industry descriptions at one level deeper than the 6-digit NAICS code.

Until recently, every Herald industry description in our taxonomy mapped cleanly to no more than one code for each of our carrier partners. In other words, every input had only one output.

This release we encountered our first scenario where our industry descriptions mapped to more than one industry code in a carrier partner’s taxonomy. As a result, we built conditional questions that helped refine our industry selection to accommodate the needs of this carrier partner.

Increased visibility of user behavior

Every quote from Herald includes a link to the broker portal of the carrier who provided that quote. Until recently we shared that link as it was sent to us by each carrier partner. This approach was quick and easy to launch, but limited our ability to understand when broker users visit the carrier’s portal.

This release we replaced these links with new links that allow Herald to track when users visit quotes on the carrier’s portal. This allows us to enhance the analytics we return to distributors and carriers partners to find insights about their users’ behavior.