Most COI software is built for collection. It stores certificates, logs the date they arrived, and reminds someone when one expires. That solves filing. It does not answer whether the certificate satisfies the contract it was supposed to satisfy, and that gap is where the evaluation should focus.
Updated September 2026.
Collection is not verification
A stored certificate looks identical whether it is compliant or not. The file is there, the expiry reminder will fire, and if someone asks whether a certificate is on file the answer is yes.
Asking whether it actually meets the requirement is a different question. It needs the contract, the certificate, and someone to read one against the other. Most platforms leave that step to a person, which means it happens inconsistently or not at all during renewal season.
The nine questions worth asking
- Batch size. How many certificates in one run, and is there a page or file ceiling?
- Forms. ACORD, CSIO, and your own template?
- Source of comparison. Against the contract, or against a requirement list someone maintains by hand?
- Evidence. Does every finding quote the page it came from?
- Document types. Policies only, or leases, contracts, tenders, quotes and loss runs too?
- Corrections. Can an issued batch come back as an editable table for a reissue?
- Audit trail. Is every comparison timestamped and attributed?
- Data residency. Which region, chosen when, and does anything leave it?
- Issuance. Who approves, and is that gate enforced or optional?
Run the demo on a real document
The single most revealing part of an evaluation is insisting on a live run against one of your own client contracts rather than a prepared example. Demonstration documents are clean, structured and representative of nothing. Real ones are scanned, amended, sometimes handwritten, and the insurance requirements are rarely in one place.
A tool that performs well on a sanitised contract and poorly on a seventy page lease with three amendments has told you what you needed to know.
What good performance looks like
For reference points rather than benchmarks: during a nine week pilot at Westland Insurance, the median time to read a full document was one minute twenty-three seconds. A ninety-five certificate batch was produced in three minutes fifty-four seconds against a three hour manual benchmark, and a hundred and fifty-two certificate book came out of a hundred and eighty page unstructured document in under fourteen minutes end to end.
Numbers like these are only useful if the vendor will reproduce them on your documents during the evaluation.
The question nobody asks early enough
Who is allowed to issue. The regulated act is issuance, not analysis, and a platform that can issue without a licensed person approving it has created a compliance problem in exchange for a time saving. Analysis does not need a sign-off queue. Issuance does.