COI Agent

What it is

Certificates of insurance are the highest-volume, lowest-margin task in a commercial agency, and they arrive on nobody's schedule: a general contractor's compliance portal, a landlord's property manager, a client forwarding a request at 4:55pm on a Friday. The COI Agent takes the request from wherever it lands, does the lookup and the checking, and leaves a CSR with a single approve-or-edit decision.

Per request, the agent:

• reads the holder request (email body, attachment, portal form, or a forwarded contract excerpt);
• identifies the named insured and finds the account and in-force policies in the AMS;
• compares what the holder is asking for (limits, additional insured status, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory wording, notice of cancellation) against the policy and its endorsements;
• drafts the ACORD 25, and 27 or 28 for property where relevant, in your existing certificate tool;
• flags anything that cannot be certified as requested and explains why, so the CSR can go back to the client instead of quietly issuing something the policy does not support;
• records the whole thing as an activity on the account.

What it is not

• It never issues a certificate without a human approval.
• It does not decide whether a holder's requirement is reasonable or negotiate contract wording.
• It does not create endorsements. If the request needs one, it says so and hands off.

How we work with you

The work is billed hourly on a time-and-materials basis. A typical engagement runs about four weeks, longer when there are more intake channels (a shared mailbox is the base; portal forms and second mailboxes add work) or an unusual certificate tool.

• Silent run first. Intake and AMS lookup run against your live certificates mailbox with nobody acting on the output; we measure match rate against what your CSRs actually issued.
• Checks tuned to your book. Requirement checks tuned to your most common holders; draft generation wired to your certificate tool.
• Supervised go-live. Approval queue live for one CSR with every draft reviewed, then rollout to the certificates team with a runbook and an accuracy report.

Ongoing operations work keeps it accurate as carriers and the AMS change.

Why an engineer

Certificate requests are where the AMS, the endorsement wording on the policy, the holder's contract language, and your issuance tool all meet. Single-step assistants can draft an ACORD 25 from a form. The work is in the checking, and the checking has to be right, because an incorrectly certified additional-insured status is an E&O claim. Every check the agent performs is logged with the policy language it relied on.

Pairs with Renewal Radar: when a policy remarkets to a new carrier, the agent knows which holders need re-issued certificates.

Next step

If certificates are the desk that hurts, tell us your AMS and roughly how many requests arrive in a week. Contact us.