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Onboarding a new third party may appear operational, but the risk decisions embedded in that process ultimately land at the executive table. One of the most overlooked and most consequential steps is the collection and validation of Certificates of Insurance (COIs).
In many organizations, COIs are still treated as administrative paperwork: collected, visually reviewed, filed, and forgotten. For today’s executives accountable for enterprise risk, that approach represents a material blind spot.
Fraudulent or invalid COIs are far more prevalent than most leadership teams realize. With readily available templates and basic editing tools, counterfeit certificates are easy to produce and difficult to detect without specialized controls. Vendors often submit COIs directly, bypassing verified insurance sources, while subtle discrepancies such as incorrect policy numbers, missing endorsements, altered dates, or spoofed broker emails can easily escape manual review.
This gap rarely becomes visible until the organization faces a loss event. When an incident occurs and an insurer determines that a COI was fraudulent or invalid, the financial and legal consequences shift immediately back to the enterprise. There’s no coverage to absorb the loss, no contractual risk transfer, and limited recourse against a vendor that may lack the resources or even the continued existence to respond.
For executives, this can mean unplanned financial exposure, increased insurance premiums, prolonged litigation, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage that extends well beyond the initial incident.
From a governance perspective, this is why COI management can no longer be viewed as a point-in-time, manual activity. It must be treated as an ongoing risk management discipline that scales with the size, complexity, and criticality of today’s third-party ecosystems and supports effective executive oversight.
Leading organizations are increasingly using third-party risk management (TPRM) platforms to bring consistency, transparency, and defensibility to COI processes. For executives, this translates into greater confidence that risk transfer is real, enforceable, and continuously monitored.
Aravo addresses COI risk by embedding insurance compliance directly into its enterprise third-party risk management platform. A foundational component is Aravo’s pre-built connector with Certificial, which brings verified insurance data from trusted sources directly into the third-party lifecycle. This eliminates reliance on vendor-submitted documents and replaces manual validation with authoritative insurance intelligence.
Beyond verification, Aravo integrates insurance data into automated workflows that support policy-driven compliance, continuous monitoring, exception management, and escalation. Every action and decision is captured within Aravo’s system of record, providing transparency and defensibility for audits, claims, and regulatory inquiries.
Critically for executives, Aravo contextualizes insurance compliance within overall third-party risk scoring. COI status can directly influence onboarding approvals, vendor risk tiers, and ongoing oversight, ensuring that insurance is treated not as paperwork, but as a core control within enterprise risk management.
In an environment where fraudulent COIs can quietly undermine risk transfer and expose the organization to unplanned loss, fragmented and manual approaches are no longer sufficient. By combining trusted insurance verification with automated governance, centralized records, and integrated risk intelligence, Aravo helps executive teams identify issues early, before an incident, before a claim, and before risk becomes loss.
Interested in learning more? Contact Aravo today!
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