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
A digital insurance switchboard
A digital insurance switchboard
This week we released the first instance of what we call data coercion, which makes submitting one insurance application to multiple carriers smoother for developers.
In the past, Herald relied on default values for each carrier’s coverage parameters to ensure that every carrier could provide a quote. With data coercion, developers can submit one desired set of coverage parameters and receive the closest acceptable value for each parameter from each carrier. Our developers can now focus on gathering information about the coverage their users want without worrying about the coverage limit rules for every carrier. We will be migrating more and more coverage parameters from default values to coerced values over time.
Fixes and Improvements
Beyond this work, we made a few other updates. Here’s what we included in this release:
- We added a risk parameter for Coterie related to previous losses that pre-fills a field required to bind in Coterie’s portal.
- We added the deductible coverage parameter for Coterie in anticipation of further data coercion.
- We expanded the permissiveness of our effective date field to allow for backdating for those carriers who allow it.
- We added foundational groundwork for managing producers at scale.
- We addressed an error that occurred when sending a zip code that does not exist.
Four? Score!
Carrier #4
We launched our fourth General Liability product with a new carrier to Herald: Coterie. Just like the three carriers we integrated previously, our customers can now generate quotes from their demo environment. They’ll get real data, but not real quotes quite yet.
Fixes and Improvements
Beyond the Coterie integration, we focused on two major themes for this release: enabling flexibility and improving stability. Here’s what we included in this release:
- We added a Coterie example to our API documentation.
- We added Coterie details to the appendix within our API documentation.
- We expanded the minimum and maximum valid effective dates to match the breadth that our carrier partners offer.
- We added in support for a certain difficult class of General Liability exposures.
- We laid the foundation for allowing customers to customize the policy values they request within a submission. We will release this feature in full when it’s ready for all carriers.
- We laid the foundation for coercing the requested policy values within a submission to the nearest acceptable value for each carrier. We will release this feature when it’s ready for all carriers.
- We removed an underwriting question that we erroneously believed was required for one of our carriers.
- We integrated Sentry to alert us of unexpected outages and errors so that we can improve the stability of our API over time.
- We made sure that our API returned JSON fields in a standard order across all endpoints.
- We updated our website so that it is obvious how you should contact us.
Tidying up
Fixes and improvements
This week we focused on tidying up. We improved performance and dealt with a few bugs:
- We improved the ordering of properties in our API response so that its easier for developers to read.
- We fixed a bug that returned an ‘active’ status for a quote without a premium under certain (rare) circumstances.
- An update to how we store requests and responses improves our ability to provide support quickly and enables us to share logs with customers in the future.
- We updated our API schema to make certain fields nullable so that there are no empty objects {} or arrays [].
- Our API documentation now explains the purpose of the beta branch: previewing upcoming changes to our API.