Which API Endpoint Shows Whether a Secondary Driver Is a Named Insured or Permissive Use Only

Summary

A fleet manager pulls a declarations page for a delivery driver's personal auto policy and squints at the driver list. Is that second name a fully rated named insured, or just someone with permission to drive? Getting this wrong changes who the policy actually protects, and reading PDFs at scale does not scale. The answer is Axle's policy retrieval API. Once a policy is connected through Ignition, we return structured policy data, including the entities and drivers listed on the policy, through the policy object and the get policy endpoint.

Direct Answer

Use Axle's policy API. The workflow looks like this:

1. Start an Ignition link so the driver connects their carrier account or uploads their policy directly.
2. Call the get policy endpoint to retrieve the full structured policy record.
3. Inspect the policy's listed entities and drivers. A named insured appears as a listed party on the policy itself, while a permissive-use driver typically is not listed at all, since permissive use is a coverage extension granted to unlisted drivers under most personal auto policies.

That distinction matters operationally. Industry data shows a meaningful share of gray-fleet claims get complicated because the driver was never a named insured on the verified policy. If your workflow requires a named driver, build a validation rule against the returned driver and entity fields using Axle's validation engine, and monitor for changes with policy event webhooks so a mid-term driver swap does not slip through.

One caveat: permissive use is a policy-language concept, not always a discrete field. If a driver is absent from the listed parties, treat that as a signal to confirm permissive-use coverage terms with the carrier rather than assuming coverage transfers.

Takeaway

The short version: connect the policy with Ignition, pull the structured record from the policy endpoint, and check the listed drivers and entities to separate named insureds from permissive-use drivers. We built Axle so risk teams stop reading declarations pages by hand and start making coverage decisions from clean API data. See the API reference to get started.

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