Herald Changelog

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.

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Two new products

We launched two new insurance products this week: one property and one general liability. This brings our total supported property products to two, and our supported general liability products to five.

Improved retry logic

We also improved how we retry getting quotes from our carrier partners if an initial request fails. For carrier partners who use expiring auth tokens, we used to follow a process like this:

1. Check the expiration time of the token we have.
2. If that time is in the future, use the token to get a quote.
3. If that time is in the past, make a request to get a new token.

This approach worked most of the time, but failed on a few rare occasions:

• If the token expired between when we checked and when we used it to get a quote.
• If a carrier partner’s token became expired before the originally-listed time.
• If our request to get a new token failed for unrelated reasons.

We have now updated our logic to retry getting tokens during these rare scenarios, resulting in fewer “unresponsive” statuses and more quotes for our users.

Fixes and Improvements

In addition to two new product integrations and enhanced retry logic, we made a few fixes and improvements to our API:

• We updated our “Commercial Statistical Plan” (CSP) property code mapping values to support our newest property product.
• Our team uses a tool called Polly.JS to record and reuse HTTP interactions in order to simulate our carrier partner APIs. We updated our Polly logic to re-record after these responses have grown stale so that our team stays up to date with our carrier partners.
• We fixed a bug in our dynamic application endpoint (/applications) that duplicated a question about the insured’s gross sales.
• We fixed a bug that would send only the first claim event of many to certain carriers.
• We simplified the information required to quote certain high-risk classes of business for one of our carrier’s General Liability product.

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Commercial Property

This week we have launched a new line of business: Commercial Property. Developers will now be able to quote policies for five total lines of business: Property, General Liability, Business Owners’ Policy (BOP), Workers’ Compensation, and Cyber. To support this new line, we created a standard set of Property coverage parameters and added new underwriting questions.

Dynamic Data Coercion

Herald helps maximize quotes through a function we call “data coercion,” which nudges requested coverage values towards the nearest input value that will yield an active quote for each carrier. Data coercion helps our distributors reduce the referral and declination rates of their submissions.

Previously we applied the same coercion logic across all classes of business within the context of any insurance product. This week we updated our coercion rules to dynamically change this logic based on the class codes associated with the applicant. We made this change after noticing that, for a subset of high-risk class codes, carriers were referring submissions to their underwriters that could be automatically quoted with minor changes to coverages.

This seemingly small change resulted in a big increase in approval rate for our distribution partners. One distributor saw a 20% decrease in General Liability referrals after our dynamic coercion adjusted the medical expense limit for certain high-risk classes.

Fixes and Improvements

Beyond launching a new line of business and changing our coercion logic, we also made a few fixes and improvements:

• We updated how we handled P.O. box addresses for a certain carrier partner to return a status of “declined” rather than “unresponsive.”
• We fixed a bug that incorrectly invalidated certain submissions for applicants with claims within the last three years.

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