The life of a certificate request

A certificate request usually arrives with urgency and very little detail: a contractor needs to be on a job site tomorrow, and the general contractor will not let them on without a COI. The request names a holder, sometimes an address, and occasionally the wording the holder wants.

The first job is to turn that into three facts: who the holder is, which of the client's policies the holder needs to see, and whether the holder expects to be an additional insured or to have a waiver of subrogation. Everything that goes wrong later usually traces back to one of those three being assumed instead of confirmed.

Most requests are for an ACORD 25, the Certificate of Liability Insurance, because most holders care about general liability, auto, umbrella and workers' compensation. It is the right default.

It is not always the right form. A lender or a landlord asking about a building wants evidence of property insurance: the ACORD 27 for personal property such as a home, or the ACORD 28 for commercial property. An ACORD 25 issued to a client with only property coverage is not a certificate at all; it is a blank page with a logo.

A certificate should repeat what the policy says, and nothing else. The safest limits are the ones copied from the policy record rather than retyped from an old certificate, because an old certificate may carry a limit from last year's term.

That makes the certificate only as good as the policy record. If the record is out of date, every certificate built from it will be too, which is a good reason to fix the record rather than the certificate.

Additional insured and waiver of subrogation are the two boxes most often ticked on request and least often checked against the policy.

A certificate does not make anyone an additional insured. The policy does, usually through an endorsement. Ticking the box for a holder who is not covered creates a document that says something the policy does not, and that is exactly the kind of discrepancy that surfaces after a claim.

The decision is also rarely all-or-nothing. A general contractor can be an additional insured on the general liability policy and not on the auto policy. Recording that per policy, and per holder, is what keeps the next certificate for the same holder consistent with the last one.

Sending the certificate is the easy part. Being able to answer "did we send it, to whom, and what did it say?" three months later is the part that matters when a holder claims they never received it.

Every certificate that goes out should leave a record against the holder: the date, the recipient and the file itself, not just a note that it was sent.

A certificate describes a policy term. When the policy renews, every certificate issued against the old term is out of date, and the holders who received them will eventually ask for new ones — often on the day they need them.

The agencies that handle this well keep the holder list attached to the client, so reissuing after a renewal is a matter of generating from a list that already exists rather than reconstructing it from old emails.

In Agency Nexus, that sequence looks like this:

• The request can come from the agency desk, or from the insured through the client portal, where it arrives in a queue.
• The form is chosen from the coverage on file, and a form that would print blank is refused with an explanation.
• The limits are filled from the policy record, using only active, bound and renewed policies.
• Additional insured and waiver are recorded per policy and per holder, and nothing is granted by default.
• Delivery is by email, to one holder or up to 50 recipients, and every send is logged with the file.
• At renewal, holders stay on the client's certificate master. Agency Nexus does not reissue certificates automatically; a person generates them from that list.

The certificates of insurance page covers each step in detail.