Herald Changelog

A look back at year two

In June 2022, we published a Changelog looking back at our first year. Since then, we’ve continued to expand our infrastructure in supporting connections to more carriers and to enable more functionality for our users. We wanted to reflect again on how far we’ve come in another year! Over the last twelve months we’ve more than doubled our total integrations, now offering more than 40 integrations across 8 lines of business. We believe we’re the best in the world at rapidly integrating commercial insurance APIs, and we’re only just getting started.

We’re particularly proud of our progress because not all integrations are created the same! This year we added several specialty lines of insurance, such as Miscellaneous Professional Liability and Management Liability, both of which are newly API-ifiyed products in the industry and come with new levels of complexity.

In total, we now connect to:

• 9 Cyber products
• 8 General Liability products
• 7 Business Owner’s Policy products
• 5 Miscellaneous Professional Liability Products
• 5 Management Liability Products
• 3 Workers’ Compensation products
• 2 Property products
• 1 Tech E&O product

Herald integrations now come with much more functionality than they did a year ago. To call out just a few highlights, in the last year we’ve added:

• Bind 2.0, a more robust bind endpoint that accounts for the wide array of scenarios we’ve encountered across carriers as well as static bind orders.
• Producers, to allow customers to add and manage producers as well as their access to quote certain products
• Applicant and Agent Facing Text, to allow customers to customize the type of question text their users sees based on the experience they’re trying to build
• Knockout Logic, which communicates to an applicant as they fill out questions for a product if they become ineligible and are ‘knocked out’
• The ability to obtain files from carriers via API
• Enhancements to our dynamic application including ordering, sections, and currency
• Classifications, an endpoint that allows customers to get classifications to classify an applicant
• The Herald Request Builder (HeRB), an interactive demonstration of our dynamic application with real-time API requests
• Herald Docs that are accessible to the public from our website

We have ambitions to achieve even more in this coming year to empower our carrier partners and their distributors. Get ready for what’s coming next!

Growth on the API Index

We’ve also updated the Insurance API Index, as APIs continue see tremendous growth in 2023! There are now 155 API-enabled products across 57 carriers and 20 different lines of business on the index. Compared to 2022, in 2023 this represents:

• 57% growth in the number of carriers with digital capabilities
• 60% growth in the number of commercial API enabled products

Read more about our update in our 2023 API Index blog post.

New Line of Business: Management Liability

We’re also excited to announce that we’ve recently added a new line of business, Management Liability (ML), which includes 5 new products with our launch!

Fixes and Improvements

To call out a few updates from this sprint:

• We’ve expanded our file offerings in our dummy bind. We now offer Application and Cyber Risk Assessment file types in addition to Quote Summary files.
• We resolved a bug that was creating a confusing error message when an incorrect claim date is submitted by an applicant.

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Static Bind Orders

We’ve made another improvement to Bind 2.0! In our Bind 2.0 flow, users gather information in a Bind Application (just like an Application to quote). We call this a ‘dynamic’ flow as the Bind Application will update when new information is required, based on any conditional logic in the application. Users then submit a complete Bind Application to a carrier with a Bind Order.

In our initial release, users were required to create a Bind Application and to use the ‘dynamic’ flow. We’ve now added the option to use a ‘static’ flow in which users can submit values directly to a Bind Order, bypassing the Bind Application. This again parallels the two options users have for sending submissions to Herald. We still validate that all of the information required by a carrier present.

Carrier Question Updates

Two carriers recently changed their underwriting question set: Arch and Coalition. For Arch, we now support new questions which are backward compatible with the old ones. For Coalition, we support changes that were also required for their partners. For users of Herald’s dynamic application, all of these changes take place automatically and no additional work is required from our partners to implement the new questions.

Fixes and improvements

• We resolved a bug where a specific coverage value was being mapped to a response  incorrectly

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Bind 2.0 with CFC!

In our last changelog, we announced that we launched an updated version of our bind endpoints (Bind 2.0) in Beta. This week we’re excited to announce Bind 2.0 functionality is now live with CFC for their Cyber and Tech E&O products. We’ve also included a few new bind features:

• Pre-fill from the application: When starting the Bind process with Herald, we now automatically pull in the relevant date if it was provided at the quote stage, for example a desired effective date. If the data is invalid — such as if the effective date becomes out of a carrier’s range — we allow the user to update that information.
• Invalid status for expired quotes: A user attempting to bind an expired quote will receive an error message indicating that the quote is expired and cannot be bound.
• Policy Files: Users can use Herald’s Policies endpoint to retrieve various files provided by carriers post-bind such as the Dec Page, Policy, and Endorsements.

Stay tuned as we continue to roll out documentation and add new carriers and products to bind 2.0!

Another BOP product

We’ve recently added 1 new Business Owners Policy (BOP) product, bringing our number of BOP products to 7.

Account linking

When generating quotes via API, some carriers will provide an account_ID which can be used to associate future submissions and quotes with the same applicant/insured. Herald now captures these account_ids (at times called company_ids, company_code, account_number, etc…) and automatically applies it to future submissions that users send. We will expand this functionality to additional carriers as they make it available.

Now, as a result, users who log into carrier portals where this functionality is in place will see multiple submissions and quotes grouped together.

Fixes and improvements

• We updated a cyber product to reflect changes in carrier required questions.
• Carriers often require producers to authenticate with their API via email. Under various scenarios, a single producer may use different emails with different carriers. Herald now allows a single producer to specify a specific email for any given carrier with which they are establishing a connection.

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