Bramble vs TrustLayer: Contract-to-COI Intelligence vs Basic COI Tracking

TrustLayer has raised $23 million and built a solid platform for collecting, storing, and tracking certificates of insurance. If your goal is to stop chasing vendors for paper COIs, TrustLayer does that well.

But there's a problem most risk managers discover too late: a COI can be perfectly current and still leave you completely exposed.

The reason is simple. TrustLayer verifies that a COI exists and hasn't expired. It doesn't read your contract to confirm the coverage on that COI actually satisfies what you negotiated. Those are two fundamentally different problems - and only one of them is the one that costs you money when something goes wrong.

What TrustLayer Does Well

TrustLayer's platform handles the operational burden of COI collection. Vendors receive automated requests. Documents are stored centrally. Expiration alerts fire before policies lapse. For teams drowning in manual certificate requests, this is a real improvement over spreadsheets and email chains.

TrustLayer also serves multiple industries - real estate, construction, hospitality, facilities management - with a generalist approach that works reasonably well across sectors.

For companies whose primary problem is "we don't know if our vendors have insurance at all," TrustLayer solves that.

The Gap TrustLayer Doesn't Close

Here's what TrustLayer doesn't do: it doesn't read your lease, your vendor agreement, your service contract, or your insurance exhibit.

Your contract with a tenant might require $2 million in general liability, waiver of subrogation, and your entity named as additional insured. TrustLayer will confirm the COI is current. It will not tell you whether the $2M requirement is met, whether subrogation has been waived, or whether your name appears on the endorsement.

That gap is where your real exposure lives. According to industry data, 70% of COIs are non-compliant at first receipt - meaning coverage limits, endorsements, or policy terms don't match the contract requirements. A system that confirms a COI exists but doesn't verify those specifics gives you a false sense of compliance.

When a $500,000+ uninsured incident occurs, "we had a COI on file" is not a defense. "The COI didn't match the contract's requirements" is the conversation no one wants to have after the fact.

What Bramble Does Differently

Bramble is Document Compliance Intelligence. The platform reads both documents: your source contract and the COI submitted against it.

When a vendor submits a certificate, Bramble doesn't just confirm it exists - it extracts the specific insurance requirements from your contract (limits, policy types, endorsements, additional insured language, waiver of subrogation clauses) and compares them line by line against the COI.

The output is a compliance gap report: exactly which requirements are met, which are deficient, and what the vendor needs to correct. Not "this COI is valid." Specifically: "General liability limit is $1M against a $2M requirement - gap of $1M."

This matters because compliance is not binary. A COI isn't just valid or invalid. It's compliant or non-compliant against your specific contractual requirements. TrustLayer tells you the former. Bramble tells you the latter.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Capability	TrustLayer	Bramble
COI collection & storage	Yes	Yes
Expiration tracking & alerts	Yes	Yes
Automated vendor reminders	Yes	Yes
Multi-industry support	Yes	Yes
Reads source contract	No	Yes
Extracts contract requirements	No	Yes
Clause-level gap analysis	No	Yes
Additional insured verification	Basic	Contract-specific
Waiver of subrogation check	No	Yes
Coverage limit compliance	No	Yes

Real-World Scenario: Why This Matters

A property management company manages 200 commercial tenants. TrustLayer confirms all 200 have current COIs. Looks clean.

But 60 of those tenants have leases requiring $3M in general liability - their COIs show $1M. Forty tenants haven't endorsed the landlord entity as additional insured. Twenty have let their umbrella coverage lapse without updating the certificate.

With TrustLayer, the dashboard shows 200 green checkmarks. With Bramble, the dashboard shows 120 compliant tenants and 80 flagged for specific deficiencies - before an incident exposes them.

This is not a hypothetical. The 70% first-receipt non-compliance rate is an industry benchmark. Most COI programs are creating an illusion of compliance, not actual compliance.

Who Should Choose TrustLayer

TrustLayer is the right choice if:

• Your primary problem is operational: you don't have a central repository of COIs
• You don't have standardized insurance requirements in your contracts
• You manage a small vendor base with simple, uniform coverage requirements
• You need broad TPRM features beyond insurance (licenses, financial data)

TrustLayer's broader platform may also suit enterprises that want insurance verification as one piece of a larger vendor management system.

Who Should Choose Bramble

Bramble is the right choice if:

• You have contracts with specific, negotiated insurance requirements
• You want to verify compliance, not just confirm existence
• Your legal or risk team reviews contracts and needs AI to operationalize those requirements
• You've had incidents where coverage gaps were discovered after the fact
• Your insurance requirements vary by vendor type, contract term, or jurisdiction

If you're managing commercial leases, construction subcontracts, vendor agreements, or service contracts - and those documents contain specific insurance exhibits or clauses - Bramble does something TrustLayer cannot.

The Cost of "Close Enough"

TrustLayer costs vary by volume. Bramble's pricing is similarly usage-based.

The real cost comparison isn't between the two platforms. It's between what each platform actually delivers.

Manual COI tracking costs the average team $36,400 per year in labor alone (15-20 hours per week at $35/hour). Both TrustLayer and Bramble eliminate most of that.

But the cost of a single uninsured incident - legal defense, settlement, coverage gap - routinely exceeds $500,000. That cost is only prevented if your COIs are verified against your contracts, not just confirmed as current.

Paying for TrustLayer and discovering non-compliance after an incident is more expensive than paying for Bramble and finding gaps before they matter.

The Bottom Line

TrustLayer is a COI tracker. Bramble is a contract compliance platform that includes COI tracking.

If your contracts have teeth - if they contain specific insurance requirements you've negotiated - then tracking COIs without reading those contracts leaves the most important gap unfilled.

See what Bramble finds in your contracts. Book a demo at getbramble.com and we'll run a sample comparison against your actual documents within 24 hours.