Since Day 1, we've worked with our customers to build the infrastructure that wires together the commercial insurance ecosystem. We started with a simple belief: the easier it is for brokers and carriers to connect, the better the insurance industry works for everyone.
That belief led us to build a digital infrastructure that enabled brokerages to quote and bind across multiple carriers through a single API layer. It was a meaningful step forward. And it laid the foundation for something much bigger.
Over the last year, we've reached an incredibly exciting milestone: a true, fully digitized placement experience, as easy for a broker to use as sending an email.
Send an email. Get back quotes and materials that help you sell in real time. These are placement superpowers, delivered to your inbox.
And because everything flows through Herald, that data is accessible to every system you already use: your AMS, your CRM, wherever you need it. Every submission is captured, trackable, and measurable across the organization.
A broker's first job is to educate a business about what insurance they need and why. But when a client decides they are interested in buying insurance coverage, the brokerage's work has only just begun.
What follows is the placement process, and it covers a lot of ground.
Intake: first, a broker must gather data from a client that spans basic firmographics, detailed operational questions, and nuanced information about financial, technical, legal, and other risk controls.
Marketing: then, they must go to market and solicit quotes from carriers. This requires coordinating with many carriers across different channels and response times.
Presentation: finally, there is still a sale to complete. The broker must gather information and make the case that they have found appropriate insurance policies for a client at the right price.
This placement process does not take place within one team or one system of record. In large brokerages, there are complex routing rules in place to ensure business is worked on by the proper specialists. And different tools and standards are across the organization. With every team or system handoff, the complexity of the process increases and the effectiveness of the organization drops.
This is why placement is a pervasive hidden bottleneck across the industry. The work is essential to unlock growth, but it's expensive to scale.
We know that a broker's work almost always starts in their inbox. That's where placement starts, so we meet brokers there with a personalized AI agent that engages over email. From there, we provide end-to-end capabilities to automate placement across each step of the process.
To make this work for the largest brokers and their carrier partners, we anchor our automated placement capabilities in three principles:
Personalized AI. We routinely hear brokerage leaders say, "It takes me 10 years to train a new team member." Our AI needs to learn that knowledge, and maintain it, rapidly. It works when we combine cutting-edge technology with the deep context required to execute effectively in the insurance industry. As a result, we developed insurance-domain-focused AI that extracts information from emails, documents, and spreadsheets, infuses it with insurance knowledge, and personalizes to work the way your team needs.
Connectivity. We built a broad connectivity network across the carriers that matter most to brokers, with the ability to work in real time. When a submission comes in, it reaches the right markets instantly.
Openness. We kept an infrastructure-first mindset so that everything we do can be accessed from your systems and works wherever you need it.
So why does this matter?
Because for the first time, brokers can deliver on strategic placement at scale.
Win more business by being faster and higher quality. Brokers using Herald get quotes back in minutes instead of days. That speed wins business. It frees up time to work on business you're missing and strategic opportunities you're pressed for time to pursue. And it enables your teams to efficiently scale for the first time.
Cross-sell at a scale that was previously impossible. 85-90% of SMB clients purchase only one line of business. That's massive untapped revenue sitting inside your existing book. Herald makes it possible to proactively offer cross-sell quotes to every eligible account at renewal, automatically, across your entire firm.
Ensure business is placed where it should be. Brokerages lose revenue and create E&O risk when submissions don't go to the markets they know serve their clients best. Now brokers have visibility into where business is going and tools to make the strategic choice the easiest one for their teams.
Now we're taking this everywhere placement happens, across every team, every line of business, every workflow.
Placement lives in many places across a firm. We have the flexibility to unify it in a way that works for individual teams while bringing the strategy of the entire firm to life. Your growth levers, your carrier partners, your way of working, all connected.
This is our Intelligent Placement System.
Want to learn more? Reach out to us at hello@heraldai.com.
