Herald Changelog

Thank you for your patience here. This entry is about a week late because your beloved author was traveling to sunny San Diego. But this one is worth the wait, because we launched three big features.

1. Another BOP carrier

Markel’s Business Owners’ Policy (BOP) product is now available through Herald. Not only does this addition expand our BOP appetite, but it also represents the first carrier with two separate products available through our API. This title won’t belong exclusively to Markel for long; we’ve got a long list of carriers with multiple automatically-underwritten products that we’re integrating as quickly as possible.

2. Webhooks

When you create a submission through Herald, we immediately return a quote id for every product you’ve requested. Today, our customers use that id to poll our API (using the GET /quotes endpoint) and check each quote’s status. When the quote status moves from “pending” to “active” our customers can show the price.

This approach required our customers to write polling logic that can be frustrating to build and maintain. With webhooks, we remove this frustration by returning push notifications for certain events. To start, Herald will send notifications when quotes change status. In the future, we will use this same infrastructure to send notifications for other events.

3. "Conversational" applications

Our customers build applications that collect information about a business and submit it to carriers through Herald. But building an application that collects all of the required information for a submission is a complex task. Today, our customers must account for the following four elements in their applications:

1. Questions: The user must answer all the risk and coverage questions that carriers require to get a quote for their product. This list grows when getting quotes for multiple products.
2. Conditionality: You have to show users additional questions according to conditional logic. For example, some questions are only relevant for businesses within a certain state or industry.
3. Validation: Risk and coverage values must be sent to Herald in a valid format so that we can send that information to all relevant carriers at the correct level of specificity.
4. Maintenance: These elements shift as carriers change questions, validation rules, and conditional logic over time.

Last week, we launched a new “conversational” application endpoint (/applications) that removes the burden of these four elements from our customers. This endpoint receives any known information about the applicant, and returns the full list of required questions to render on screen for the user. Our customers can iterate on this process until the application status becomes “complete.” At this point, the application can be submitted and the user can receive quotes.

This feature is currently available in beta. If you are interested in trying it out, or learning more, please reach out to us at hello@heraldapi.com.

Fixes and improvements

In addition to Markel’s BOP product, webhooks, and the /applications endpoint, we also made various other fixes and improvements:

• We added support for multi-location, multi-building BOP submissions.
• We updated the quote status for certain classes of business to “unsupported” when applying for BOP products. We will support more and more of these classes over time.
• We updated the flowchart in our API documentation to reflect the “unsupported” status.
• We updated our documentation to reflect the /applications endpoint (in beta).
• We edited the documentation around the /submissions endpoint for brevity and clarity.

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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.

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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

Announcing our $8M Seed round to build digital infrastructure for commercial insurance | by Matt Antoszyk | HeraldAPI | Dec, 2021 | Medium

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…

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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.

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