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.
Herald Added Defaulting and Native Email Quoting
We've been focused on developing, refining, and enhancing our commercial insurance APIs. While this update provides key highlights, more details will be shared soon. Stay informed about the latest features and improvements, with additional updates to come.
Effortless Insurance Applications with Herald's Autofill API
Say goodbye to tedious data entry! Herald's new Autofill API streamlines the insurance application process by instantly populating Herald applications with saved business data. Whether starting fresh or completing a partially filled application, Autofill ensures accuracy while saving valuable time. Elevate your workflow and boost efficiency with seamless integration—try it today!
Herald & Babbix Introduce Native Quoting in Outlook
Email remains a dominant tool for insurance brokers, but manual workflows slow down the quoting process. Now, Herald and Babbix are changing that. With native quoting inside Outlook, brokers can instantly extract key data from emails using Babbix’s AI-powered tools, while Herald submits that information to carriers—returning a panel of quotes as soon as they’re ready. No more back-and-forth emails or manual data entry. Easily integrate it into your existing platform or launch a new offering with zero new code required. Watch a demo here.
First quote in production
Liftoff
This changelog is short and sweet. We’d like to share a major milestone for us: we delivered our first live quote in production.
It’s important to appreciate this milestone while also remembering that this quote is the first of many to come. We remain focused on expanding our reach to more insurance carriers, lines of business, and distribution platforms over time.
Until then, thank you to everyone who helped us get here. Here’s to many more milestones in the future!
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.