ACORD 125

What the ACORD 125 is for

The ACORD 125 is the front of a commercial submission. It carries everything about the applicant that is not specific to one line of business, so the same information does not have to be re-keyed on the general liability, property, auto and umbrella sections that attach behind it.

It is also the form an underwriter reads first. A submission with a thin or contradictory 125 gets slower quotes and more questions, so the time spent on it early is recovered several times over across the marketing process.

What it collects

Described in our own words, block by block. This is a summary of the information the form gathers, not a reproduction of the form itself.

Agency and policy information

The producing agency, the carrier the submission is going to, the proposed term, and the lines of business being applied for.

Applicant information

Legal name, mailing address, entity type, federal identification number, website, and the business classification codes that drive rating and appetite.

Contact information

The people at the applicant an underwriter, an inspector or a claims adjuster will need to reach.

Premises information

Each location, with occupancy, interest, and the construction and protection detail an underwriter needs to place the risk.

General information

The eligibility and moral-hazard questions: prior cancellations, bankruptcies, judgments, uncorrected fire-code violations, and other operations.

Nature of business and prior carrier history

A description of what the applicant actually does, and the carriers, terms, premiums and losses for the prior years.

Check before it leaves the agency

The defects that cause trouble later are nearly always the same handful. Run these before the form goes out.

• The legal name and entity type match the applicant's formation documents, not the sign on the door. This is the single most common cause of a policy issued to the wrong entity.
• Every operating entity that needs coverage is named. Subsidiaries and related LLCs left off the 125 are left off the policy.
• The classification codes describe what the business actually does today, not what it did when the account was first written.
• Every premises the applicant occupies is listed, with the correct interest, since an unlisted location is an uninsured location.
• Loss history covers the number of years the carrier asks for and reconciles with the loss runs you are attaching.
• Any yes answer in the general-information block is explained, either in the space provided or on an attached ACORD 101.

What the ACORD 125 does not do

• It does not bind coverage. Only the carrier binds, and the ACORD 75 records that.
• It does not carry line-specific rating detail. The general liability, property, auto, umbrella and work comp sections do that.

Which edition?

ACORD revises its forms, and the edition date is printed in the bottom-left corner beside the form number. This page deliberately does not name an edition, because a hard-coded one goes stale and a stale edition on a reference page is worse than none. Produce the form from your own management system, which will give you the current version, and read the corner if a carrier or a contract has asked for a specific one.

At renewal

BindCheck reads a bound renewal against the prior policy and reports every form, limit, deductible and endorsement that changed, with each finding cited to the page it came from. That matters for this form because what you put on an ACORD is only correct for as long as the policy behind it is unchanged: a certificate, an evidence form or a schedule of interests prepared from last term's facts is a defect nobody sees until the party relying on it needs it.

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