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.
Herald Added Defaulting and Native Email Quoting
We've been focused on developing, refining, and enhancing our commercial insurance APIs. While this update provides key highlights, more details will be shared soon. Stay informed about the latest features and improvements, with additional updates to come.
Effortless Insurance Applications with Herald's Autofill API
Say goodbye to tedious data entry! Herald's new Autofill API streamlines the insurance application process by instantly populating Herald applications with saved business data. Whether starting fresh or completing a partially filled application, Autofill ensures accuracy while saving valuable time. Elevate your workflow and boost efficiency with seamless integration—try it today!
Herald & Babbix Introduce Native Quoting in Outlook
Email remains a dominant tool for insurance brokers, but manual workflows slow down the quoting process. Now, Herald and Babbix are changing that. With native quoting inside Outlook, brokers can instantly extract key data from emails using Babbix’s AI-powered tools, while Herald submits that information to carriers—returning a panel of quotes as soon as they’re ready. No more back-and-forth emails or manual data entry. Easily integrate it into your existing platform or launch a new offering with zero new code required. Watch a demo here.
Workers' Compensation
Our first workers' compensation carrier
Sorry we didn’t write to you two weeks ago. We were busy meeting with folks at Insuretech Connect in Las Vegas! It was the first industry conference where Herald was represented (and it was a blast).
This week we launched our first carrier for our second line of business: workers’ compensation. In addition to having a lot of demand for this line of business, we saw value in supporting multiple lines of insurance as quickly as possible. Here’s what is new for workers’ compensation:
- We created new workers’ compensation risk parameters.
- We created a standard set of workers’ compensation coverage parameters across multiple carriers’ products.
- You can now request quotes for products from multiple lines of business in a single request.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to adding workers’ compensation as a line of business, we also expanded some features and improved performance of existing ones. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- One of our carriers requires us to whitelist the IPs addresses of all servers that send in API requests. In order to support integrations with this carrier (and others like them) we set up a proxy server through which we route all relevant requests.
- Our carrier partners can now use the Herald Sandbox environment to test out our integration of their own products.
- We restructured some risk parameters so that they are no longer nested under NAICS code, namely “total payroll” and “gross sales.”
- We added security controls to ensure that platforms cannot see submissions they are not entitled to see.
- Developers can now send in the insured representative name and contact information for certain products. Because this information is required at bind, this will accelerate that process for those products.
- We are also excited to be growing the Herald team! We added a new page on our website where you can learn about Careers at Herald. The thumbnail below is of our “filter friday!”
Tightening the screws
Fixes and improvements
We’re working hard in the background updating our API to support submissions for multiple lines of business while integrating workers’ compensation products. As a result, this week’s release focused on “tightening up the screws.” Here’s what we fixed and improved:
- We removed risk values from our GET /quotes/:id response that were duplicative with the GET /submissions/:id response.
- We built internal infrastructure that makes it easier to add distribution platforms. This work relates to, but is different from, earlier work that makes it easier for any distribution platform to configure individual producers.
- We fixed a bug where our GET /quotes/:id response returned different coverage values than originally requested if a quote is declined.
- We added the ability for distribution partners include or exclude coverage for acts of terrorism (also known as TRIA).
Puzzling class codes
Simplifying puzzling class codes
Insurance companies sometimes allow external parties, usually wholesale brokers, managing general agents (MGAs), or managing general underwriters (MGUs) to use their discretion about the risk associated with a specific applicant. In these cases, users of quoting technology must provide values for fields that indicate an estimated level of risk. This release, we enabled and simplified this behavior for a certain set of businesses (which are denoted using “class codes”) when applying for specific general liability products.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to simplifying the experience for these tricky class codes, we also made some other fixes and improvements:
- We created default values for the tricky class codes we mention above to streamline showing median prices in scenarios where users can exercise underwriting discretion.
- One of our carriers requires a business description in order to get a quote under certain circumstances. We updated the value we send in this case from “TBD” to an automatically-generated description that is much more helpful to the carrier.
- We improved our ability to configure which producers and insurance products are available to specific distribution platforms.
- We expanded internal tools that add producers and authenticate them with carriers, which accelerates how quickly we can add our customers’ users and builds a foundation for automating that in the future.