Herald Changelog

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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Bind via API

This week, we published an API feature that was already available to early partners in beta: bind. ”Binding” is insurance parlance for buying a policy. Herald now empowers distributors to bind products from any carrier partner that enables this capability via API.

Developers can now bind a policy by making a POST request to our /policies endpoint with the quote ID of any product that is eligible for bind. Herald will continue to expand access to this capability as we add new integrations and existing carrier partners enable bind for their products via API over time.

Auth

We added a new auth method for consumers of our API to interact with Herald in a secure manner by using a JSON Web Token (JWT). JWT is an open standard that defines a compact and secure method for transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. Developers can make a POST request to the /auth/token endpoint to generate an expiring JWT.

While we will continue to support existing methods, JWT will become the preferred method for auth moving forward. This method is now mandatory for any consumer who will make calls directly to our API from the browser.

Fixes and Improvements

In addition to these two features, we also fixed a few bugs and made improvements to our API:

• We eliminated a bug that would replace an array of values with an empty array under certain (rare) circumstances.
• We updated a behavior to mark certain quotes as a decline that we erroneously labeled “unresponsive.”
• A carrier partner updated their auth methods in a new version of their quoting API, so we updated our API accordingly.

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