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
Third time's the charm
Carrier #3
We launched our third General Liability product with a new carrier to Herald: Markel. Just like Atlantic Casualty two weeks ago, and Century two weeks before that, 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 adding our third carrier we made a few fixes and improvements:
- We fixed a bug that created duplicate quotes when you duplicate the product ID in the submission. Product IDs must now be unique.
- We improved our error handling for duplicate coverage and risk parameters.
- Invalid dates (like June 31st) now cause an error instead of generating quote status “unresponsive.”
- We fixed a timezone issue that was causing quotes to get blocked in the late hours of Pacific time.
Carrier #2
Carrier #2
We launched another General Liability product with our second carrier: Atlantic Casualty. Just like Century two weeks ago, 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 adding another carrier (!) we made a few fixes and improvements to our application:
- Enabled Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which makes it possible to interact with our API using web applications
- Removed erroneous timestamps from the API response body
- Improved the performance of submission validation logic
- Fixed a bug to only include the secondary address field when present
Our first release
The beginning
This update represents the first entry of our changelog. Our changelog is a list of our latest product updates that we share with those who care about what we’re building. Releasing this changelog consistently helps us hold ourselves accountable and keeps our broader community up to date.
The first release
We are building an API that allows you to submit an application and receive quotes for products from multiple insurance institutions. We started with one institution (Century) for one product line (General Liability). Our first release allows our customers to generate quotes in Century’s demo environment (real data, but not real quotes).
An application is a set of information that can be submitted to any number of insurance institutions in order to get quotes. An application contains the following properties:
- Products refer to specific types of insurance policies provided by an institution within one product line. For instance, the product with the name “Century Insurance Group General Liability" is provided by “Century” for the product line of “General Liability.”
- Coverage values assign specific values to coverage parameters, which describe the nature of coverage in an insurance policy. (limits, deductibles, etc.)
- Risk values assign specific values to risk parameters which describe risks associated with the applicant. Institutions use risk values to underwrite insurance policies. (usually answers to underwriting questions)
A complete application must provide values for all of the required coverage and risk parameters for the selected products. Once a completed application is submitted, quotes are made for every requested product. Every quote has a status, and quotes with a status of “active” get pricing and coverage details.
Fixes and improvements
This release is the culmination of a series of API designs and iterated improvements. With this release we made some improvements to our previous API design:
- Removed the GET /product_lines path
- Replaced “product_line_id” in the “product” object with “product_line”
- Removed “description” from error schema (duplicative function with “message”)
- Added new risk_parameters (underwriting questions)
- Published our API documentation online
- Updated coverage parameter IDs for readability
- Updated risk parameter IDs for readability