Herald Changelog

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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Six GL Products

Sorry this is a bit late. Last week, over three thousand leaders gathered in New York City at an Insurtech Insights event and Yours Truly was one of them. Still, we’re happy to announce that Herald now supports six General Liability products. This newest integration brings our total number of supported products up to fifteen and marks the sixth new product we’ve launched in the last eight weeks.

Updates to our dynamic application

Developers can send in an array of products to our dynamic application endpoint (/applications) and receive a list of questions required to get quotes. Over the last two weeks we updated this endpoint to make it easier to use in three main ways:

• We now set the “value” property of unanswered questions to “null” instead of omitting that property entirely. This helps developers identify unanswered questions both visually (e.g., in Postman) and programmatically.
• Certain questions ask you to submit an array of equivalent values. For example, imagine a question that asks for a list of one or more addresses defining all locations relevant to a business. Previously, we returned two unanswered instances of the location value: one marked required and one marked optional. This behavior confused developers who did not understand why the second optional location was included. Now, we start with one required location, and only return an optional location once the first location is given an address.
• Finally, we updated the order in which properties are returned from the /applications endpoint to ensure consistency. This consistency makes it easier for developers to read and understand /applications responses.

Fixes and improvements

We also made the following improvements and fixes to Herald:

• We updated the error message returned when a customer sends in an expired JSON Web Token (JWT) to more accurately describe the issue.
• We added the ability for distributors, at the quote stage, to submit risk parameters that are optional to quote but are ultimately required to bind.
• We expanded our taxonomy of accepted legal entity types to include “Trustee.”

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Another one

This week, we launched another Workers’ Compensation integration. This addition brings our number of Workers’ Compensation products up to three and our total number of supported products up to fourteen. This product launch marks the fifth new product we’ve launched in the last six weeks!

Updates to our dynamic application feature

Our dynamic application feature allows developers to easily get and render the correct underwriting and coverage questions on screen for their users. To create a dynamic application, developers make a POST request to our /applications endpoint.

For this initial request, we only require the array of products for which the user wants to get a quote. The response to a successful POST /applications request includes all the known underwriting and coverage questions needed to successfully submit that quote. We also tag each question with metadata that helps developers render those questions correctly.

One request we heard from developers was to include additional information to help them organize these questions in various ways depending on the user experience they were building. During this sprint, we updated the /applications response to clearly tag each answer with the set of products for which that answer is relevant. We also added additional attributes to indicate whether each parameter was required to get a quote or to ultimately bind coverage.

Fixes and Improvements

We also made the following fixes and improvements this release:

• We added support for over 100 new industry codes across our BOP and Cyber products.
• We fixed a bug in our /submissions endpoint where, despite sending the correct producer information to the carrier, we occasionally returned the wrong producer information to the distributor.
• We fixed a bug where, for certain fields in the /applications endpoint, entering zero (0), false, or NULL blocked the application from reaching a “complete” status. Now we allow these values in all applicable fields.
• We added “early decline logic” for a Workers’ Compensation product that doesn’t have appetite for certain legal entities.
• We updated our Sentry alerting system to capture the HTTP method (POST, PUT, GET, etc.) of the triggering request to help our customer support team more quickly troubleshoot issues for our developers and their users.

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