Herald Changelog
The latest updates at Herald.
The changes below are Herald additions and updates that are backwards compatible. In the event of a change that may affect your integration with Herald, you'll be contacted in advance to ensure you have sufficient time to adjust. Read more in our guide to High Impact Changes at Herald.
Introducing Data Extractions (Beta)
Streamline quote-and-bind workflow with PDF extraction
Herald recently announced the launch of its Data Extraction feature to streamline the insurance quote-and-bind workflow by enabling brokerages to extract unstructured data from PDF documents—such as application forms—and integrate them into their systems
You can leverage the /data_extraction endpoint to post and retrieve data from PDFs that you upload via the existing /files endpoint. See step-by-step guidance here.
Note that /data_extraction is a beta endpoint. If you would like to request access to this beta release, please contact support@heraldapi.com.
Shareable links in HeRB
We’ve enabled customers to share links at every stage of the quote and bind process in HeRB. For example, you could easily share a link to a quote with your colleagues via email, or share with Herald customer success representative a bind application you need help with.
Additional feature enhancements and bug fixes
- We’ve added customer and agent facing tooltips to the appendix, allowing customers to view tooltips in the /application endpoint response
- We’ve simplified our /insurance_parameters relevance and combined identical conditionals for different products
- We’ve removed a set of conditional parameters for a carrier’s EPLI product to stay in sync with carrier requirements
- We’ve fixed a bug related to authorized vendor parameters for a Management Liability product
- We’ve fixed a bug related to re-rate flow
- We’ve fixed a bug related to a carrier’s MPL file failure in the new quote processor flow
Last updates of 2021
Before the year ends...
Despite the winter holidays, we kept chipping away at our mission of making commercial insurance easily accessible online. Here are the last changes and bug fixes we snuck in before the new year:
- We expanded support for BOP to include three additional classes of business: “chambers of commerce”, “display lettering services”, and “sign painting services.”
- We laid the foundation for a highly-requested feature: webhooks. In particular we defined events, built a queuing service, updated our encryption method, and added relevant logs.
- We improved our BOP quote rate by automatically identifying and adding a required endorsement in rare, unpredictable circumstances. This endorsement becomes available only when the carrier indicates so in the errors of their quote response.
- We added early decline logic for relevant class codes for one of our BOP providers. This improves our APIs performance so that you get an answer right away, rather than waiting for a round trip to the carrier.
- We fixed a bug that made BOP unresponsive in the (rare) event that an applicant lists a building that is 100+ stories tall.
$8M in seed funding
Moving even faster
Our changelog shares changes we make to Herald that improve our customers’ ability to connect their technology to the insurance ecosystem. Some of these improvements are direct and tangible, like new lines of business. Others are updates to our infrastructure that improve the experience of working with Herald in less obvious but equally important ways, like improved performance, security, and stability.
A third category are updates to our broader business that help us deliver these improvements even faster. Yesterday, we announced that we raised $8M in seed funding led by Lightspeed with participation from Afore Capital and Underscore. Our CEO Matt spells out in detail how we plan to use this capital to add new carrier integrations, lines of business, and features for our developers. Read about it here:
$8M in Seed Funding
Business owners applying for insurance find themselves spending time filling out paper forms, going back and forth with their brokers over email, and waiting days or weeks to get quotes. Small…
Fixes and improvements
All that said, we continue to make improvements to our API as well. Here are some changes we’ve made recently:
- We added support for a new class of business for our General Liability products: Machinery or equipment installation, servicing, or Repair.
- We added a risk parameter to account for solid fuel exposure given an update to a carrier’s underwriting requirements.
- We added the ability for our customers to set defaults to “child” coverage values, such as setting a business personal property limit (BPP limit) at each location.
- We added support for class identification at a finer level of granularity than 6-digit NAICS code.
- We fixed a bug where, for a certain set of class codes, we incorrectly rejected payroll as an exposure basis.
- We created a new quote status “unsupported” for submissions with valid class codes that Herald does not currently support. This status replaces a validation error, and will allow customers to collect valuable data for applicants that we don’t yet support.
- We added useful “read-only” coverage parameters for Workers’ Compensation for our customers to render on quote comparison pages.
- We expanded our BOP offering to include coverage for applicants with multiple locations.
Business Owners Policy
Business Owners' Policy (BOP)
This week we launched our third line of business: Business Owners Policy, also known as BOP. In addition to having a lot of demand for this line of business, we were excited to work with an incredible new carrier as our first BOP product: CNA. Here are some of the new things we built to support BOP:
- We created new BOP risk parameters.
- We created a standard set of BOP coverage parameters
- In particular, we created the first set of BOP coverage parameters that relate to specific risk parameters. Building limits and business personal property (BPP) limits relate to risks at specific buildings.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to adding BOP as a line of business, we also expanded some features and improved performance of existing ones. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- We added support for remodeling contractors for General Liability.
- We Improved security measures around how we store sensitive API information in our database.
- We improved the sophistication of our periodic carrier integration tests. We run more tests, more frequently that allow us to identify changes in carrier response before they impact our customers.
- We improved our tests to remove false alarms when carriers take a little bit longer than normal to respond.
- We fixed a bug in our documentation that obscured all but one valid type in any object schema that used the “allOf” type.
- We updated our documentation to more clearly highlight the quick-start appendix.