Risk
The Claim That Never Gets Paid
It's one of the worst moments in a shipper's freight operation: a cargo loss occurs, the claim gets filed, and then comes the discovery that changes everything — the carrier's cargo insurance policy had lapsed weeks before the shipment ever left the dock. The certificate of insurance on file is real. It's also months out of date, and nobody checked.
Why the Certificate You Have Isn't the Coverage You Think You Have
A Certificate of Insurance (COI) is a snapshot, not a guarantee. It shows that a policy existed on the date it was issued — it says nothing about whether that policy is still active on the date your freight actually moves. Policies lapse for missed premium payments, get cancelled for underwriting reasons, or simply expire and don't get renewed in time. None of that updates the PDF sitting in a shipper's file from the onboarding process eight months ago.
The Gap Between Signing and Shipping
The real exposure isn't the day the COI was collected — it's every day after that. A carrier can be fully insured when a shipper first vets them and completely uninsured by the time a load actually ships months later. Without a process to re-verify coverage on a recurring basis, that gap is invisible until a loss forces it into view, and by then it's too late to do anything but absorb the cost.
What Ongoing Verification Actually Requires
Properly managing this risk means treating insurance verification as a continuous process: confirming policy status close to the time of shipment, not just at onboarding, and maintaining a system that flags a carrier the moment their coverage lapses — ideally before they're booked on another load, not after. This is meaningfully harder to do consistently when a shipper is managing carrier relationships directly, because it requires infrastructure built specifically for that kind of recurring check, applied across every active carrier, every month.
How This Gets Handled at Bever
Every carrier in our network carries a minimum of $100,000 in cargo insurance and $1,000,000 in general liability, with Bever named as additional insured — and that coverage is verified on an ongoing basis, not just at the point a carrier joins our network. If a policy lapses, that carrier is pulled from active rotation until it's resolved. The goal isn't to have a certificate on file. It's to know, at the moment your freight is moving, that the coverage behind it is real. Ask us about our insurance verification standards before your next shipment goes out on a policy nobody has checked since onboarding.
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