Herald Changelog

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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Cyber Insurance

We recently launched our first carrier for our fourth line of business: Cyber. As businesses invest more and more in technology and attackers get more and more sophisticated, cyber events have become one of the fastest-growing categories of risk. As a result, more small businesses either choose to carry cyber insurance or are compelled to in the terms of their contracts with key customers. In turn, our distribution partners frequently request that Herald support Cyber quotes on our platform.

Here are some of the updates we made made to support Cyber:

• We added new Cyber risk parameters.
• We created a standard set of Cyber coverage parameters across multiple carriers’ products.

Fixes and Improvements

In addition to adding a new line of business, we made various fixes and improvements to Herald:

• We added a new internal feature that allows us to more safely and efficiently manage how producers are authenticated with carriers when they request quotes. This internal feature lays down the foundation to eventually externalize this function for distributors who want to add and manage producers programmatically in the future.
• We standardized how we handle “data coercion” across carriers. Data coercion allows us to nudge coverage values from what our distributors request towards the closest acceptable value for each insurance carrier.
• We also updated how we handle coercion scenarios where one coverage value is related to another. For instance, some General Liability carriers require that the “General Aggregate Limit” be exactly 2x the “Each Occurrence Limit.” Now Herald takes a standard approach towards updating the most important coverage values first and cascading the consequences of that value from there.

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Preparing for scale

As more distributors and carriers join Herald, it becomes important to update our team, processes, and technology to support the growth of our ecosystem. This sprint, we focused on making updates to our infrastructure that enables us to scale:

• We automated parts of our data pipeline to enable our team to more quickly integrate new products.
• We launched an internal tool that improves how we manage the relationships between our customers, enabled producers, and the insurance products those producers are authorized to quote and bind. This tool allows our customer success team to react more quickly to requests and helps our engineers focus on building new features.
• We improved our authentication and authorization for better performance and security.
• We added useful metadata to our alert suite that allows us to automate messages at a higher level of precision.

That said, we’re always improving our insurance capabilities:

• We added support for several more General Liability class codes, including: Appliance installation, Freight Forwarding, Interior Decorating, Furniture manufacturing, and Excavation.
• We made adjustments to how we gather information on full-time and part-time employees for Workers’ Compensation policies.
• We updated the “data coercion” rules for our BOP products. Data coercion allows Herald to find the closest match for the set of requested coverage parameters with each carrier partner.

We also launched a News page on our website for other updates about Herald from both the press and our team’s blog.

Fixes and improvements

We also made a couple of small fixes and improvements to the Herald platform:

• We fixed a bug that would cause an error when effective dates were (way) too far in the past.
• We updated the http error code when certain child parameters were missing from 500 to 400.
• We fixed a bug that retried failed webhook notifications for customers who do not have webhooks enabled.

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