How myCOI Uses OCR For Vendor Compliance in Certificate of Insurance Tracking

OCR is Changing the Game For Vendor Compliance

Optical Character Recognition (or commonly called OCR) is used to help automate processes in many industries. Essentially, the technology enables you to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into editable and searchable data.

myCOI strives to reduce a client’s risk and leverage state of the art tools to accomplish this. OCR, as described above, is an important tool in that toolkit. The technology helps bridge the gap between a modern electronic system like myCOI and the paper world, which is still the most common means of information exchange in the Insurance industry (among many other industries). myCOI’s insurance tracking platform uses an advanced form of OCR technology, coupled with in-house-built machine learning capabilities, to help our clients achieve many benefits.

In this article, we’ll take a look at why OCR is an important component to our insurance tracking software. We’ll also share 3 ways myCOI’s clients benefit from the capabilities to streamline their compliance and insurance tracking procedures while also eliminating many manual tasks.

How myCOI’s Insurance Tracking Software Incorporates OCR Technology

As compliance teams know from experience, each vendor or agent typically submits several documents for compliance review: an ACORD form, the Certificate of Insurance, and any applicable endorsements. Each of these documents include boxes, fields, and signature areas that all need to be reviewed carefully. That review process, however, can be extremely time intensive if left to manual procedures and human eyes can inadvertently skip over important areas after reviewing the same forms over and over. This is where OCR technology plays a very key role.

In order to demonstrate how myCOI has adopted this technology into our automated workflow, we’ll use an example as illustration:

A concrete vendor or his insurance agent uploads the required forms into myCOI, including the ACORD form, his Certificate of Insurance, and endorsements.

myCOI’s certificate of insurance tracking platform then uses proprietary machine learning technology to determine the document types. Our platform uses OCR to scan each document utilizing the hundreds of models we’ve built to interpret each form and indicate to the requestor (either the company’s compliance admin or myCOI’s Concierge team) how each answer should be categorized.

In this example, the insurance GL limit is $8M due to the risks associated with concrete, but the certificate the agent uploaded only shows $6M in coverage. Using OCR technology, myCOI is able to know the contents of each field on the certificate, despite the form having been scanned by the agent. Then, using what we refer to as the “Easy Button”, the system cross-references the data from the forms with all the insurance requirement rules set for that particular vendor, determining which items are actually non-compliant.

There is still work to do as many insurance compliance issues can’t be easily coded into rules due to nuances of legal language and other situations, which is where our insurance professional’s expertise comes into play. These experts leverage the OCR and automated rule checking which provides them a solid data-backed foundation for a compliance decision. In this case, even though the GL is too low, the vendor’s umbrella policy is large enough to cover that particular non-compliant area.

The requestor has now been guided through each of the compliance items that they set up in myCOI’s platform, cross-referencing each requirement. Not only have they eliminated significant time spent manually checking over each document, but they can rest assured that they (or their myCOI Concierge) are making the best compliance decision for each type of vendor—in this case, a high risk concrete vendor with many unique requirements.

3 Compliance Benefits of OCR Technology

1. Saves internal compliance teams and myCOI’s Concierge team time with automated rules
2. Ensures accuracy and completeness of certificates
3. Allows the final compliance decision to be controlled by humans who can accommodate various scenarios

Ready to Learn More About How We Use OCR in Certificate of Insurance Tracking?

Interested in learning more or want to see how certificate tracking with myCOI can help mitigate your insurance risk? Request a product demo or sign up for our newsletter to stay in the know.

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