myCOI Alternative: Why Companies Switch from myCOI (Illumend) to Bramble

myCOI - now rebranded as Illumend - has been in the COI tracking market for years and built a genuine user base among risk managers and property teams who needed to get COI collection under control. If you're on myCOI/Illumend today, you likely chose it because it was more structured than spreadsheets and offered some compliance verification layer.

The question worth asking now is: what exactly is being verified?

The core limitation of myCOI/Illumend's approach - and the reason teams switch to Bramble - is that it verifies COIs against generic or manually configured coverage thresholds, not against the clause-level requirements in your actual contracts. That gap creates the appearance of compliance without the substance of it.

What myCOI/Illumend Does

Illumend (formerly myCOI) offers a COI management platform that handles the workflow of collecting, storing, and monitoring certificates of insurance. The platform sends vendor reminders, tracks expiration dates, and applies coverage rules to flag non-compliant certificates.

The compliance checking is rule-based: you configure minimum coverage thresholds per vendor type or vendor group, and the system flags COIs that fall below those thresholds. This is a meaningful step up from pure manual review.

Illumend has also positioned itself closer to Bramble's positioning around contract-to-COI compliance - and that's worth examining carefully, because the execution differs significantly.

The Verification Gap

The fundamental question in COI compliance is: compliant against what?

For most platforms, "compliant" means "meets the configured threshold." A $1M GL requirement in the system gets checked against the GL limit on the COI. Pass or fail.

But your actual contracts are more complex than a single threshold. A commercial lease insurance exhibit might contain:

• Specific limit requirements that vary by coverage type
• Additional insured endorsement language requiring primary and non-contributory status
• Waiver of subrogation clauses
• Cross-liability coverage requirements
• Umbrella policy requirements that must follow form
• Cancellation notice requirements (30 days vs 10 days)
• Exclusion prohibitions (e.g., no residential construction exclusion)

Configuring all of these manually for every vendor, for every contract, for every renewal cycle, is operationally impossible at scale. And even when configured, you're relying on a human to translate the contract language correctly into threshold settings.

Bramble reads the contract itself. The AI ingests your lease, your vendor agreement, your subcontract - and extracts the specific insurance requirements directly from the document. No manual configuration. No human translation step. The source contract is the source of truth.

What Switches Look Like in Practice

Teams that move from myCOI/Illumend to Bramble consistently report the same discovery: their existing COI portfolio, which showed largely compliant under the old system, surfaces material gaps when run through contract-level comparison.

The gaps tend to cluster in a few categories:

Endorsement gaps. A COI shows the required GL limit but lacks the additional insured endorsement your lease requires. myCOI checks the limit. It doesn't check the endorsement language.

Umbrella stacking issues. A tenant's umbrella policy doesn't follow form to the GL, creating a gap between the $1M GL and $5M umbrella. This requires reading both the COI and the lease exhibit's umbrella requirements.

Subrogation waivers. Your contract requires waiver of subrogation. The COI doesn't reflect it. Most threshold-based systems don't check for this at all.

Wrong entity. The additional insured endorsement names "ABC Property Management" but your lease entity is "ABC Property Holdings LLC." Close enough for a threshold check; not close enough for an insurance claim.

These are not edge cases. The 70% first-receipt non-compliance rate means most COI portfolios have material findings waiting to be uncovered. The question is whether you find them before or after an incident.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Capability	myCOI / Illumend	Bramble
COI collection & storage	Yes	Yes
Expiration tracking	Yes	Yes
Automated vendor reminders	Yes	Yes
Manual threshold configuration	Yes	Not required
Reads source contract	No	Yes
Extracts requirements automatically	No	Yes
Clause-level gap analysis	No	Yes
Endorsement language verification	No	Yes
Waiver of subrogation check	No	Yes
Entity name verification	No	Yes

The Manual Configuration Problem

One of myCOI/Illumend's core operational requirements is that someone configures the compliance rules. For simple, uniform vendor programs, that's manageable. For portfolios with diverse contract requirements, it creates ongoing maintenance burden.

Every new contract type requires a new rule configuration. Every contract negotiation that changes insurance requirements requires a configuration update. Every renewal season creates a window where configurations may be stale.

Bramble eliminates this step. When a new lease is executed, you upload the document. Bramble extracts the insurance requirements. When the tenant submits a COI, comparison runs against those extracted requirements automatically. No configuration queue. No translation errors. No maintenance lag.

For large portfolios - commercial property companies managing 100+ tenants, staffing firms managing 1000+ client contracts, construction firms managing 50+ active subcontractors - this difference compounds materially.

Pricing and Migration Considerations

myCOI/Illumend pricing varies by vendor count and features. Bramble's pricing is similarly usage-based.

The ROI case for switching centers on two figures:

1. Labor savings from eliminating manual rule configuration - typically 5-10 hours per week for portfolios of 50+ vendor relationships
2. Incident exposure reduction - the $500,000+ cost of a single uninsured incident, divided by the probability of discovering a coverage gap before it becomes an incident

Teams that run their existing myCOI/Illumend portfolio through Bramble's comparison engine typically find 15-30% of their "compliant" vendors have material coverage gaps. That discovery justifies the switch.

Who Should Stay on myCOI/Illumend

Illumend remains a reasonable choice if:

• Your vendor program has simple, uniform coverage requirements
• You have a small team dedicated to manual rule configuration and maintenance
• Your contract requirements don't change frequently
• You need the breadth of Illumend's TPRM features beyond insurance

Who Should Switch to Bramble

Bramble is the right choice if:

• Your contracts contain specific, clause-level insurance requirements
• You want the source contract - not manual configuration - to drive compliance checking
• You have material portfolio size (50+ contracts) where manual configuration creates maintenance burden
• You've discovered post-incident that your "compliant" COIs didn't satisfy your contracts
• Your risk or legal team reviews contracts and needs AI to operationalize those reviews at scale

The Bottom Line

myCOI/Illumend tracks COIs against configured thresholds. Bramble reads your actual contracts and compares COIs against what you negotiated.

The former is useful for operational hygiene. The latter is what actually reduces your exposure when an incident occurs and an insurer asks whether the coverage met your contractual requirements.

See what Bramble finds in your current COI portfolio. Book a demo at getbramble.com and we'll run a sample comparison against your contracts.