Herald Changelog

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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A look back at year one

In June of 2021 we published the inaugural Changelog entry (Our first release) about the first General Liability integration in our sandbox environment. That was first time we enshrined our mission of building digital infrastructure for commercial insurance in actual working code. Since then we’ve built a lot more and wanted to take a moment to look back at our first year.

Here’s a summary of the digital ecosystem we’ve built in a year:

• 16 integrated insurance products
• 6 General Liability products
• 4 BOP products
• 3 Workers’ Compensation products
• 2 Property products
• 1 Cyber product
• Webhooks that push notifications for key events
• Data coercion that maximizes the chance of receiving an active quote
• A Dynamic application that eliminates the need to manage the complexity of questions and conditionality
• Bind functionality that moves our distributors one step closer to managing the entire policy lifecycle via API

This took a lot work and our team is extremely proud, but it’s also important to note that we could not have built this ecosystem in a vacuum. The digital distribution ecosystem depends on the passionate and talented people at the distributors and carriers we partner with, who share our commitment towards digitizing commercial insurance.

The Insurance API Index

The index catalogs nearly 100 commercial insurance APIs available today.

Last week we launched the Insurance API Index, which catalogs commercial insurance APIs available today. This is the first index of its kind, and aims to celebrate the carriers who have made significant investments in industry-leading technology. You can read more about how we built the index and what it represents in our blog Introducing the Insurance API Index.

You guessed it, another new product

What better way to celebrate one year of Herald than to announce yet another insurance API integration! We’ve released a new Business Owners Policy (BOP) product, bringing our number of supported BOP products up to four.

Fixes and Improvements

We also made the following fixes and improvements this release:

• We took our dynamic application endpoint out of beta.
• We fixed a bug where we allowed you to submit a string for a limit, but doing so caused the quote to eventually fail. Now we only allow you to submit integers for limits.
• We made an update to throw a 404 error instead of a 500 error when trying to GET a non-existent application.

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