As many of you are aware IWC in recognition of a need amongst us Collectors for a more "secure" certificate pertaining to the authenticity of a particular watch, changed process and have made available a Certificate of Authenticity.

To obtain a COA for a particular watch, the watch for obvious reasons needs to be sent back to Schaffhausen for verification by the experts there. This certificate can be ordered for a fee, by bringing the watch to any IWC Authorized Distributor (your local AD) or of course, one of the many IWC Boutiques.
This meant that the Extracts which could previously be obtained without physically sending a particular watch back to Schaffhausen were now no longer available to us Collectors. Many of us felt that there still is a need to be able to obtain research information for a particular watch and that some mechanism is needed that would enable Archive research on individual pieces within our collections.
After discussions with MF and other Collectors, and at request of a few of you I addressed this issue with IWC.
Not only did IWC management take the time to meet with and discuss this topic with us, they also committed to investigate what, if anything, could be realized to help resolve this requirement. They acted quickly and during the 2013 SIHH Collectors Forum Meeting in Geneve last month Andreas Voll from Business Development & Customer Service provided us with the good news that they believed they had found a solution to the problem. He also shared with us their thinking around the solution, and even produced a concept document to discuss with us.
Based on this, we provided additional information and shared some of our further ideas around the concept.
I am most pleased to inform you that today Andreas discussed this with me again, and confirmed that things were processing and that he fully expects that all necessary information around the availability and process to obtain the new form of document, will be shared beginning / mid of March with us formally and will be posted on the forum.
Thank you IWC for yet again showing great support to us Collectors out here, and for providing excellent customer service.