Herald Changelog

Brand New Docs

This week we released our brand new Herald Docs, accessible to the public from our website. Prior to this release our docs were private, only accessible to customers with a login.

Few things affect a developer’s experience more than API documentation, and the world’s leading infrastructure companies all publicly expose their docs. These observations inspired us to start down the journey of sharing more and more of our documentation with the broader insurtech community. We strive to make our product one of the easiest APIs for developers to integrate with, and this release is a monumental step in our journey. Our new docs emphasize the core concepts of our product, and walk developers through specific use cases.

This material marks a first step in our journey towards open documentation, and we will add new docs and guides over time.

More clarity for inactive quotes

Last month, we announced our detailed status messages for quotes that are referred, declined, or unsupported. These status messages provide context as to why the quote is inactive, which could be anything from an out-of-appetite class code or too many employees.

As of this release, we’ve expanded status messages to every carrier integration making it easier than ever to get active quotes during testing.

Fixes and Improvements

• We began collecting and storing the full response for each error to speed up the troubleshooting process.
• We fixed a bug in our webhooks, where unresponsive quotes were not receiving a webhook response.
• We expanded our supported class codes for Workers Comp, GL, and BOP, which introduced 6 new risk parameters.
• We fixed a bug that was not returning a portal link for one of our recent carrier integrations.

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Expanding Appetite

If you’ve been keeping up with our changelog, you know that we release multiple new insurance products every month- but the work doesn’t stop there. Every product has its own set of class codes with unique conditionality, which requires tedious class code mappings from our integrations team.

In this release, we added over 14,000 new supported class codes for our cyber products. This expansion included professions throughout industries like manufacturing, contracting, and agriculture, just to name a few. This is a large step forward on our mission to support every class code for our integrations.

Instances

Applications at Herald are constructed with a series of risk and coverage parameters, equivalent to underwriting and rating questions. Some parameters can have multiple values, for cases like an applicant that has multiple locations. Herald uses the property [.h-code]creates_array: true[.h-code] to communicate this.

Previously, it was hard to distinguish between unique instances of a parameter that had multiple values. In this release, we made an update to include an [.h-code]instance[.h-code] property to give each parameter a unique identifier.

Every risk and coverage parameter that has [.h-code]creates_array: true[.h-code] now includes [.h-code]instance[.h-code], with a value to define the instance in the application. For example, the first instance of location would be [.h-code]instance: location_1[.h-code], the second would be [.h-code]location_2[.h-code], and so on.

Fixes and improvements

We also made the following fixes and improvements this release:

• We introduced logic to remove additional values to multiple choice questions when [.h-code]None of the above[.h-code] is selected.
• We added more information to the phone and email schemas in dynamic application response.
• We added new optional coverage parameters to our cyber integrations.

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2 more Cyber integrations

This week we integrated our second and third Cyber products. These integrations bring us to a total of 18 supported products. These new Cyber integrations allow our distribution partners to get quotes that include coverage for Social Engineering, among other things.

Detailed status messages

We’re now providing detailed status messages when a quote is referred, declined, or unsupported. The status_reasons array in our quote response provides messages that describe why the quote is not active. This information helps developers get active quotes more easily when testing, and prevents users from having to guess why their submission did not generate a quote. This update also makes it easier for us to monitor status reasons over time to ensure that we return active quotes to our distributors as often as possible.

Fixes and Improvements

As always, we’re still bashing bugs and improving our API:

• We added an error message when submitting an address object that is missing required fields like State or ZIP code.
• We fixed a bug where, for users who had access to certain insurance products only, our [.h-code]/coverage_parameters[.h-code] endpoint did not return ‘deductible.’
• We updated the text for some of our underwriting questions to standardize common terms, align grammar, and generally make them easier to understand.

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