Automating Certificate of Insurance (COI) Validation for Global Contracts — International, Specialty Lines & Marine, General Liability & Construction

For a Contract Risk Manager overseeing international vendor networks, construction projects, and specialty marine exposures, validating Certificates of Insurance (COIs) across borders is a relentless challenge. Policy terms vary by country, coverage names don’t line up neatly with U.S. standards, endorsements hide in fine print, and documents arrive in multiple languages and formats. The result is slow cycle time, inconsistent enforcement of contractual insurance provisions, and elevated risk. Nomad Data’s Doc Chat solves this by using AI to extract, validate, and map coverage data from multilingual COIs against your exact contract requirements—at portfolio scale.

Doc Chat is a suite of purpose-built, AI-powered agents designed for insurance operations. It ingests entire files, reads every page, and returns a structured, auditable pass/fail assessment with page-level citations you can trust. Contract Risk Managers can finally AI validate international COI submissions in minutes, automate certificate of insurance audit multinational programs, and extract coverage data from foreign language COI packets without adding headcount. Learn more about Doc Chat for insurance here: Doc Chat by Nomad Data.

The COI Problem, Amplified for the Contract Risk Manager

COI review is deceptively complex, especially for the Contract Risk Manager responsible for multi-jurisdictional agreements across International, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction. In the U.S., you may ask for ACORD 25, additional insured via CG 20 10 04 13 and CG 20 37 04 13, primary and non-contributory via CG 20 01 04 13, and a waiver of subrogation via CG 24 04, CA 04 44 (auto), or WC 00 03 13 (workers’ comp). Outside the U.S., you’ll see equivalents: U.K./EU public liability and employers’ liability attestations, Australian Certificates of Currency, Canadian proof of WSIB/WCB coverage, and broker letters or cover notes in markets where ACORD isn’t standard. In Specialty Lines & Marine, you may require proof of cargo insurance under Institute Cargo Clauses (A), P&I (Protection & Indemnity), H&M (Hull & Machinery), or charter party-specific evidence.

Across these lines of business, Contract Risk Managers must ensure what’s on the certificate aligns with the contractual insurance provisions in your vendor agreements, MSAs, project contracts, and purchase orders. That means validating limits (sometimes in multiple currencies), occurrence vs. claims-made, retroactive dates, completed operations terms, additional insured and waiver language, project-specific aggregates, endorsements by number, and territory/jurisdictional scope. With vendors submitting non-standard formats—French attestations d’assurance, German Versicherungsbestätigung, Spanish certificados de seguro, Japanese 保険証券, broker emails, scanned PDFs—crucial requirements can be easy to miss.

How COI Validation Is Typically Handled Manually Today

Most organizations still rely on manual review to compare COIs against contract requirements. The process looks familiar to any Contract Risk Manager:

COIs arrive via email, portal uploads, or shared mailboxes; staff download and route them to reviewers.
Reviewers scan the certificate, endorsements, and (if you’re fortunate) policy excerpts. They might paste text into a translator for non-English documents.
They key values into spreadsheets: insured name, policy numbers, carrier, effective/expiration dates, limits, deductibles/SIRs, additional insured/waiver status, retro dates, and endorsements.
They reconcile currencies with ad hoc lookups, then evaluate pass/fail against a requirement matrix.
If anything is missing, they send emails back to the vendor or broker, wait for a response, and repeat.

This manual approach is slow, inconsistent, and difficult to audit. Seasonal spikes and project mobilizations create backlogs. Fatigue leads to missed exclusions or endorsements. Multilingual COIs and specialty coverages introduce ambiguity that even seasoned analysts must research. Most problematic, teams can only spot-check a fraction of the portfolio—leaving hidden gaps that surface only when a loss occurs.

Your Global COI Validation Checklist (International, Specialty & Marine, GL & Construction)

Regardless of geography or line of business, every COI should be validated against the contract’s specified insurance obligations. A practical checklist for the Contract Risk Manager includes:

Insured identity and legal entity match: Vendor legal name, subsidiaries, DBA alignment with contracts and purchase orders.
Policy term: Effective and expiration dates covering the contracted work period, plus evidence of ongoing coverage for completed operations where required.
Coverage types: General Liability/Public Liability, Auto/Motor, Employers’ Liability/Workers’ Compensation, Umbrella/Excess, Professional/PI, Cyber, Environmental/Pollution, Marine Cargo (ICC A/B/C), P&I, H&M, Contractors All Risks (CAR) or Erection All Risks (EAR).
Limits and aggregates: Per-occurrence, general aggregate, products/completed operations aggregate, project-specific aggregate; umbrella stacking and follow-form confirmation.
Currency normalization: Convert local limits to your home currency; validate they meet or exceed required levels.
Claims-made vs. occurrence: Retroactive dates, extended reporting periods (ERP), and continuity of coverage for claims-made lines (e.g., PI, Cyber).
Additional insured: Language and/or endorsements (e.g., CG 20 10, CG 20 37; local equivalents) covering your entity and any owner or GC/prime as required.
Primary and non-contributory: Wording and endorsements (e.g., CG 20 01) showing the vendor’s coverage is primary.
Waiver of subrogation: Endorsements for GL/Auto/WC/EL (e.g., CG 24 04; WC 00 03 13) or equivalent jurisdictional language.
Territory/jurisdiction: Global coverage where needed, including suits brought outside vendor domicile; marine trading limits and navigational warranties.
Exclusions and special terms: High-risk exclusions (e.g., action-over, residential construction, watercraft, US/Canada exports), marine war/strikes, cyber carve-outs, pollution endorsements, contractual liability carve-backs.
Deductibles/SIRs: Validate against contract caps; ensure SIR financial responsibility where required.
Carrier quality: AM Best/S&P rating thresholds or local solvency requirements; Lloyd’s syndicate acceptability.
Authenticity and completeness: Broker signatures, endorsements attached, or acceptable attestations from the market where endorsements aren’t customarily appended to COIs.

Completing this checklist consistently, across languages and policy traditions, is exactly where human-led processes struggle—and where AI built for insurance documents excels.

Why AI Now: From OCR to True Coverage Inference

Legacy automation tools focused on optical character recognition and keyword search. That’s not enough for COIs, where the information you need is often scattered across certificates, endorsements, broker letters, and policy schedules—and expressed in different languages and market conventions. As Nomad Data explains in Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs, insurance document automation is about inference as much as extraction. It has to map local terminology (“Public Liability,” “Third-Party Liability,” “Certificate of Currency”) to contract-required coverages, and identify the presence of implied protections (e.g., additional insured status proven by either specific endorsement number or binding wording on broker evidence).

Modern AI changes the game. With Doc Chat, you can ask, “Does this vendor meet the additional insured and primary/non-contributory requirement for the ABC Project contract? If yes, cite pages; if no, list deficiencies and draft the broker request.” You’ll get an instant, defensible answer grounded in the actual documents.

How Doc Chat Automates End-to-End International COI Validation

Doc Chat by Nomad Data is purpose-built for insurance, ingesting entire claim or contract files—thousands of pages at a time—and returning fast, accurate, and thoroughly cited results. For the Contract Risk Manager, the platform automates global COI validation across International, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction at scale:

Multilingual ingestion and translation-aware understanding: Reads COIs and broker letters in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and more, normalizing terminology (e.g., “Public Liability” to GL equivalent) so it aligns with the contract’s requirement set.
Contract-to-COI mapping: Doc Chat is trained on your contractual insurance provisions—project-by-project or template-by-template. It compares required coverages, limits, and exact phrases (additional insured, primary/non-contributory, waiver of subrogation, completed operations) with what’s present in the COI and endorsements.
Currency normalization: Automatically converts local currency limits to your base currency using policy-effective or current rates, then evaluates pass/fail.
Endorsement and clause detection: Identifies U.S. forms like CG 20 10, CG 20 37, CG 20 01, CG 24 04; CA 20 48; WC 00 03 13; and recognizes jurisdictional equivalents or contract-acceptable broker attestations in markets where form codes aren’t standard.
Marine and specialty inference: Reads cargo schedules for ICC (A/B/C), war/strikes endorsements, P&I limits and scope, H&M values, charter party obligations, and navigational warranties; flags gaps versus charter contracts and bills of lading requirements.
Retro dates and claims-made logic: Extracts retro dates for PI and Cyber; confirms continuity and ERP needs for contract compliance.
Deficiency management: Produces a structured exception list with reason codes and page citations; drafts a broker request email noting missing endorsements or inadequate limits.
Real-time Q&A: Ask questions like “List all additional insured language by policy and endorsement” or “Show evidence of waiver of subrogation for WC/EL,” with immediate page-linked answers.
Portfolio scale and surge handling: From a single project mobilization to a global supplier onboarding wave, Doc Chat scales without overtime or temp staffing.
Instant auditability: Every conclusion links to its source page, supporting internal reviews, external audits, and disputes.

Doc Chat doesn’t just speed up a tedious process; it elevates accuracy and consistency. In fact, Nomad routinely moves reviews from days to minutes—processing up to roughly 250,000 pages per minute—while standardizing outputs across the entire COI program.

Specialty Lines & Marine: Applying AI to P&I, H&M, and Cargo Evidence

Specialty Lines & Marine requirements complicate COI validation. Contracts may require P&I at specified limits, H&M valued coverage, cargo under ICC (A) with war and strikes, and compliance with charter-party or bill of lading clauses. Evidence can arrive as broker letters, cover notes, policy schedules, or market-specific certificates.

Doc Chat understands these nuances. It identifies:

P&I scope: Third-party liabilities, crew liabilities, fines, pollution limits, navigational/operational warranties.
H&M: Sum insured, deductible, machinery coverage details, trading areas, lay-up warranties.
Cargo ICC clauses: Coverage level (A/B/C), war/strikes endorsements, warehouse-to-warehouse terms, special declarations for high-value goods, territorial restrictions, and named insured alignment with shipper/consignee obligations.

The AI then maps this evidence against the contract’s Specialty Lines & Marine insurance provisions, returning a precise pass/fail with itemized deficiencies and draft remediation requests for the broker or vendor.

General Liability & Construction: Endorsements, Completed Ops, and Project Aggregates

Construction and GL-heavy contracts demand specific, testable proof: additional insured status for ongoing and completed operations, primary and non-contributory language, waiver of subrogation, project-specific aggregates, and endorsements by form number. Doc Chat identifies U.S. endorsements (CG 20 10 04 13; CG 20 37 04 13; CG 20 01 04 13; CG 24 04; CA 20 48; WC 00 03 13) and detects jurisdictional equivalents abroad. It also checks for action-over exclusions, residential exclusions, or other carve-outs that might violate your contract’s risk allocations.

Crucially, the system evaluates claims-made lines (e.g., Project Professional Indemnity) for retroactive dates and ERP requirements, confirms completed operations timeframes, and normalizes currency for project aggregates—citing the exact pages where each requirement is satisfied or not.

“AI Validate International COI” at Scale: Governance, Explainability, and Security

Adoption hinges on trust. Doc Chat provides:

Page-level citations: Every assertion is backed by a clickable link to the exact page and line, echoing the transparency seen in our clients’ claims teams. See how Great American Insurance Group leverages page-level explainability in our recap: Reimagining Insurance Claims Management.
SOC 2 Type 2 security: Enterprise-grade security, privacy, and governance.
Defensible audit trails: Time-stamped logs and versioned outputs show what was reviewed, when, by whom, and why a pass/fail was assigned.
No model training on your data by default: Aligns with enterprise norms and regulator expectations.

With explainability and governance built in, you can confidently “AI validate international COI” submissions and withstand internal audits, third-party assurance reviews, and regulatory scrutiny.

How the Process Was Done Manually vs. With Doc Chat

Manual COI Validation

Under the manual model, Contract Risk Managers rely on analysts to read every document, translate terms, cross-walk endorsements, re-key data into spreadsheets, and email vendors for fixes. Turnarounds stretch to days or weeks for non-U.S. submissions, and consistency varies by reviewer experience. The most common failure modes are missed endorsements, misunderstood foreign terminology, and currency conversion errors.

Automated with Doc Chat

Doc Chat ingests the COI, endorsements, and related evidence; understands the language; maps policy features to contract requirements; converts currencies; detects endorsements/clauses; and generates a pass/fail report with citations. It also drafts broker follow-ups and updates your risk registers automatically. For a multinational portfolio, it can run this process across every vendor, every month—something human teams simply cannot do.

Business Impact for the Contract Risk Manager

Organizations implementing Doc Chat for global COI validation report measurable gains:

Time savings: Reviews move from hours per COI to minutes, even for complex Specialty Lines & Marine evidence. Portfolio-wide quarterly audits become overnight runs.
Cost reduction: Less overtime, fewer temps, and reduced reliance on external consultants for translation and specialty coverage interpretation.
Accuracy and consistency: AI doesn’t fatigue; it applies the same logic every time. Missing endorsements and misaligned terminology are caught with page-level citations.
Risk reduction: Fewer uninsured losses and disputes because gaps are caught pre-mobilization. Enterprises gain leverage in vendor negotiations and renewals.
Scalability: Surge volumes during project ramp-ups or supplier onboarding are handled without bottlenecks.

These outcomes mirror the broader document-intelligence ROI discussed in AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry—where standardizing extraction and validation creates immediate, compounding returns.

Why Nomad Data: The Nomad Process, White-Glove Service, and 1–2 Week Implementation

Most vendors sell tools; Nomad delivers outcomes. With the Nomad Process, we train Doc Chat on your playbooks, contract templates, requirement matrices, and real COI examples. We co-create the validation rules and outputs you need, then deploy them quickly.

Highlights for Contract Risk Managers:

White-glove service: Our team interviews your top reviewers to codify unwritten rules—how you interpret complicated endorsements, acceptable foreign equivalents, and exception thresholds.
Rapid implementation: Typical time to value is 1–2 weeks for a production-ready workflow, thanks to modern APIs and a drag-and-drop interface your team can use on day one.
Deep insurance expertise: We understand the difference between an ACORD 25 and a market attestation, how to trace additional insured language when no form codes exist, and what a charter party actually requires from P&I evidence.
Real-time Q&A over massive files: Ask Doc Chat for any proof, and it answers with citations across thousands of pages.
Evolves with your program: As contracts and risk appetites change, we update playbooks so your COI requirements are enforced consistently.

For a deeper look at how AI transforms document-heavy insurance workflows with speed and transparency, read Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation.

“Automate Certificate of Insurance Audit Multinational”: A Realistic Scenario

Consider a global construction program mobilizing vendors across the U.S., Mexico, Germany, and Japan. Contracts mandate GL with additional insured (ongoing and completed ops), primary/non-contributory, waiver of subrogation, auto liability, EL/WC, umbrella, and project-specific aggregates. Specialty Lines for logistics include cargo ICC (A) with war/strikes and P&I for chartered tugs.

Manually, your team would spend 3–5 hours per vendor COI packet, longer for non-English documents, and additional time for back-and-forth with brokers to obtain correct endorsements. With Doc Chat, the system:

Reads COIs in Spanish, German, and Japanese; normalizes coverage names; converts limits to USD; and applies the project requirement matrix.
Detects CG 20 10/CG 20 37 or equivalent wording on foreign attestations; flags missing P&I pollution sublimits.
Generates a pass/fail report with a remediation email for the broker, citing exact pages and suggested alternative wording where market conventions differ.
Logs every action and updates your CLM or vendor management system.

What took weeks becomes an afternoon. Risk posture improves before vendors set foot on site or cargo leaves the port.

“Extract Coverage Data from Foreign Language COI” Reliably: Features That Matter

To reliably extract coverage data from foreign language COI and map it to your contracts, your AI must do more than read text. It must reason about insurance logic and policy traditions.

Coverage mapping: Understanding that “Public Liability” in the U.K. corresponds to GL requirements in your contract—and validating required elements like AI/PNC/waiver.
Endorsement equivalence: Detect form codes when present (CG 20 10, etc.) and accept jurisdictional equivalents or acceptable broker statements where codes aren’t customary.
Claims-made logic: Retro dates and ERP for PI and Cyber, continuity across policy periods.
Marine nuances: ICC clauses, P&I scopes, H&M warranties, and charter-party driven obligations.
Currency and unit normalization: Limit conversions, deductible/SIR recognition, and territory/jurisdiction scope alignment.
Exception authoring: Auto-generated broker/vendor notices pre-filled with the precise gaps and acceptable remedies.

These capabilities reflect the core thesis in Nomad’s Beyond Extraction: you’re not just pulling data; you’re automating the expert judgment that transforms document content into defensible compliance decisions.

Implementation Blueprint: From Pilot to Standard Operating Procedure in 1–2 Weeks

Nomad’s white-glove approach brings you to value fast:

Discovery (Days 1–2): We review your contract templates, requirement matrices, and sample COIs/endorsements across target geographies and lines of business.
Playbook encoding (Days 2–5): We codify your rules into Doc Chat—required coverages, acceptable equivalents, minimum carrier ratings, endorsement language, and exception thresholds.
Pilot (Days 5–8): You drag-and-drop a set of live COIs. Doc Chat returns structured pass/fail with page citations and draft remediation emails. We refine edge cases with your SMEs.
Integrations (Days 7–10): Optional APIs connect Doc Chat to your CLM, vendor portal, or ERP for automated intake and status updates.
Go-live (By Week 2): Your Contract Risk Manager orchestrates a controlled rollout, expanding by region, vendor segment, or project portfolio.

Because Doc Chat works on day one without heavy IT work, teams often start validating production COIs during the pilot—then add integrations as the program scales.

Controls, Audit, and Regulatory Confidence

COI programs sit at the intersection of procurement, legal, risk, and compliance. Doc Chat supports robust governance:

Traceability: Page-cited results, versioned outputs, and time-stamped actions.
Policy: Enforcement of minimum carrier ratings, territory language, and jurisdictional compliance terms.
Security: SOC 2 Type 2 controls and enterprise data handling.
Change management: When your contracts or thresholds change, we update the playbook so enforcement remains current and consistent.

This approach mirrors what leading claims organizations have learned about AI’s need for explainability and auditability—see our GAIG webinar recap for how page-level citations accelerate trust and adoption.

Measuring ROI: The Contract Risk Manager’s Scorecard

Set targets that reflect both efficiency and risk outcomes:

Cycle time: Median COI review time drops from hours to minutes. Global portfolio audits shrink from months to days.
Coverage gap detection: Increased identification of missing endorsements and retro date issues before mobilization.
Cost to validate: 50–80% reduction versus manual review and external consulting for foreign-language/specialty cases.
Consistency: Near-100% adherence to playbook rules with page-cited evidence for every decision.
Scalability: Ability to re-validate entire vendor bases on demand (e.g., quarterly), not just at onboarding or renewal.

These improvements echo the industry-wide gains we document in The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks: when machines read everything with perfect attention, humans can focus on exceptions and strategy.

Practical FAQs for the Contract Risk Manager

Will AI hallucinate endorsement results?

In document-bounded tasks like COI validation, Doc Chat grounds answers exclusively in uploaded materials and returns page-level citations. If a required endorsement isn’t present, the system states that clearly and drafts a broker request highlighting the deficiency.

Can Doc Chat handle broker letters and market-specific attestations?

Yes. In markets where form codes aren’t standard, Doc Chat evaluates the wording itself and maps it to your required outcomes (e.g., additional insured, primary/non-contributory, waiver) with citations.

What about cross-border data handling?

Nomad supports enterprise security and compliance requirements, including SOC 2 Type 2. We work with your IT and legal teams to meet data residency and privacy obligations.

How do we keep requirements current?

Through Nomad’s white-glove service, we maintain your playbooks as contracts, risk appetites, or regulations evolve. Updates can be deployed rapidly across your global portfolio.

From Bottleneck to Advantage

Validating COIs across international supply chains shouldn’t be a manual slog. With Doc Chat, Contract Risk Managers can enforce contracts precisely—no matter the language, format, or policy tradition—while collapsing cycle times and reducing risk. It’s how leading teams now AI validate international COI submissions, automate certificate of insurance audit multinational programs, and reliably extract coverage data from foreign language COI packets.

See how fast your organization can move from backlog to real-time control. Explore Doc Chat for Insurance and start your 1–2 week path to a scalable, auditable global COI validation process.