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
30 API Integrations
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Two New Products
We launched two new insurance products this week: one Business Owners' Policy (BOP) and one Cyber Insurance. These integrations bring us to a total of 30 supported products, including 7 supported Cyber products and 6 supported BOP products.
Fixes and Improvements
- Updated error messaging to be more user friendly in cases when the Herald database goes down or a risk/coverage parameter isn't in the proper [.h-code]object[.h-code] format.
- Added a new coverage for an existing Workers' Compensation integration.
Demo Products and New API Integrations
Demo Products
In November 2021 we introduced a demo surplus lines General Liability product that allows developers to explore Herald's API prior to getting carrier approvals for (real) products. This week we launched 3 new demo products to give developers access to more API functionality that they will encounter for multi-product submissions across different lines of business.
These products will have all of the same functionality and features that are available for real carrier products. The features below weren't previously available for Herald's demo products:
- The [.h-endpoint-link]/files[.h-endpoint-link] endpoint announced last week allows customers to generate mock files for each product.
- The new demo product appendix will contain information only relevant to the Herald demo products.
- Customers can use the [.h-endpoint-link]/classifications[.h-endpoint-link] endpoint to search for industries and NAICS codes.
Three New Products
This week we launched 1 new line of business (Tech E&O) and 2 new Miscellaneous Professional Liability (MPL) products. These integrations bring our total number of supported products up to 28 across 8 lines of business.
Our current Tech E&O integration is an admitted product that is bundled with Cyber insurance. Future integrations will offer Tech E&O as a standalone product.
Fixes and Improvements
- Added missing input validations to the Herald Appendix and the [.h-endpoint-link]/applications[.h-endpoint-link] endpoint.
- Fixed a bug where we were incorrectly returning an [.h-code]unresponsive[.h-code] status for certain class codes.
- Updated the name of the Herald General Liability product which can be found in the [.h-endpoint-link]/products[.h-endpoint-link] endpoint.
MPL and Files
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MPL
This week we launched Miscellaneous Professional Liability (MPL), a new line of business, with 2 new products. These integrations bring our total number of supported products up to 25 across 7 lines of business.
Files
There are many different types of files that carriers provide with their quotes. We are excited to announce that Herald has now made those files accessible via our API.
When a quote has corresponding files available, we now include details on those files in the quote response. This information is accessible in the [.h-code]files[.h-code] array, which contains a [.h-code]file_id[.h-code] to access the file and some relevant metadata for the file.
Customers can use these [.h-code]file_id[.h-code]‘s to:
- Access the full metadata available for the file using [.h-endpoint-link] /files/:id[.h-endpoint-link], such as the file’s [.h-code]size[.h-code], [.h-code]format[.h-code], and [.h-code]type[.h-code].
- Get a temporary link to stream the content of the file using [.h-endpoint-link] /files/:file_id/get_temporary_link[.h-endpoint-link].
Fixes and Improvements
- Added quote expiry, so after 60 days all Herald quotes will have an expired status, regardless of the original status returned for the quote.
- Implemented automated testing to help detect carrier changes that cause quote requests to fail.
- Added support for 2 NAICS industries across all integrations.
- Updated API validation to return the minimum and maximum allowed values and input types for risk parameters where this was previously missing.