Herald Changelog

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.

Our API Reference is Open to the Public

This week we officially made our API Reference public, which contains details about Herald's full API schema. Previously, we limited access to our API Reference to customers only, using a login. Our API reference contains sample requests, sample responses, and the ability to make mock calls.

We previously released our public-facing Herald Docs, which document the core concepts and principals of Herald. With the addition of our now-public-facing API Reference, you have full transparency into our product. Our API Reference provides visibility to both our [.h-code]master[.h-code] and [.h-code]beta[.h-code] branches, documenting both released and unreleased features.

Fixes and Improvements

• We improved our data cleaning to strip everything after a trailing [.h-code]/[.h-code] from domain names. Previously submitting a domain name such as [.h-code]heraldapi.com/docs[.h-code] would cause an error, but our data cleaning now transforms it to [.h-code]heraldapi.com[.h-code].
• We fixed a bug that allowed users to submit a string of characters, such as [.h-code]yes[.h-code], as a valid domain name.
• We updated domain name to be an optional parameter for certain products.
• We fixed a bug that required a risk parameter for 5-year claim history when using certain cyber products, even when it was irrelevant.

Tailoring question text to your audience

An applicant, or an agent representative, must answer questions about their level of risk and the coverage items they seek in order to get an insurance quote. This week we launched support for alternative versions of the same question text: one oriented towards the applicant and one oriented towards their agent. We now provide applicant- and agent-facing text for every risk and coverage parameter in Herald.

With this feature, our customers can customize which type of question text their user sees based on the experience they're trying to build. Prior to this release Herald only offered one version of the text for each question that was provided by the relevant carriers. This text was inconsistent across the multiple carriers integrated with Herald. Sometimes this text was written for the applicant, other times for the agent.

These text options appear in the [.h-endpoint-link]/applications[.h-endpoint-link] responses, located within the [.h-code]parameter_text[.h-code] object for each risk and coverage parameter. We have also documented the details around applicant- and agent-facing text in the Appendix for every parameter in Herald.

Fixes and Improvements

• We fixed a bug that was returning quotes without a [.h-code]portal_link[.h-code] for certain Cyber products.
• We enhanced Cyber products to accept more values for Aggregate Limits.
• We improved the error messaging around certain malformed requests to our /quotes endpoint.
• We fixed a bug that was throwing an erroneous [.h-code]400[.h-code] error when Content-Type was not set to “application/json.”

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