Operational efficiency has become a defining advantage in the Surety market. As volumes grow and expectations rise, firms that can process work faster and with less friction are pulling decisively ahead. Recent research from Everest Group shows that the most efficient Surety firms operate at 2–3× the productivity of their peers—a gap that continues to widen as technology adoption accelerates.
What separates these leaders isn’t scale, but how effectively they apply technology to automate routine work, streamline workflows, and focus expertise and resources where it matters most. Tinubu supports this shift with a unified platform purpose-built for Surety, helping brokers and carriers turn modernization into measurable productivity gains.
As we head into 2026, we’re highlighting several Tinubu capabilities—available today and coming soon—that leading carriers can use to improve efficiency and productivity.
Rules-Based Automated Underwriting for Speed and Scale
In the Surety Outlook 2025 survey, brokers highlighted slow underwriting responses as a major pain point. Carriers that adopt technology and processes to deliver faster response times can gain a competitive advantage. Tinubu’s platform automates various aspects of underwriting without sacrificing rigor.
- What It Is: A configurable system that allows carriers to automate underwriting decisions and workflows based on predefined rules for credit scores, application answers, and other risk criteria.
- The Problem It Solves: Manual underwriting for high-volume, low-margin bonds is inefficient, and slow turnaround times can cause brokers to take business elsewhere.
- How It Works and Its Value: Carriers set rules to auto-approve, auto-decline, or flag applications for manual review. For example, a bond application with a credit score above 700 might auto-approve, while one indicating past bankruptcy could be routed to a senior underwriter with targeted due diligence questions. This triages submissions, allowing underwriters to focus expertise on complex cases while speeding up straightforward approvals.
- Key Benefits: Increases underwriting capacity, improves broker satisfaction with faster responses, and ensures consistent, disciplined risk assessment.
Status Inquiry: Transforming Project Monitoring from Chore to Advantage
For contract Surety, monitoring bonded projects is vital but notoriously manual. Tinubu’s Status Inquiry feature digitizes and automates the process. This feature is in beta with one Tinubu client and launching broadly soon.
- What It Is: A tool that automates the scheduling, generation, distribution, and tracking of status inquiry requests to contractors on bonded projects.
- The Problem It Solves: The manual process of sending, chasing, and processing paper-based status reports is extremely time-consuming for carriers and inconvenient for contractors, leading to low response rates and poor project visibility.
- How It Works and Its Value: Carriers can set automated schedules (e.g., quarterly) by bond amount or risk profile. The system generates pre-filled PDFs for easy contractor response—by mail or digitally—and centrally tracks all submissions. Missed reports are flagged, and returned data can streamline Work-in-Progress (WIP) updates.
- Key Benefits: Saves carriers significant administrative time, improves contractor response rates through a user-friendly process, and provides proactive, data-driven visibility into project health.
Bond Library: The Industry's Largest Bond Form Repository
The search for the correct bond form is a common pain point, and Tinubu’s Bond Library transforms it from a time-consuming chore into an instantaneous process. The Bond Library is available now.
- What It Is: A centralized, searchable database of over 30,000 editable bond forms, including commercial, contract, carrier-specific, and jurisdiction-specific documents.
- The Problem It Solves: Manually locating, verifying, and managing thousands of bond templates across different states, carriers, and obligees is slow and error-prone, delaying issuance and risking compliance errors.
- How It Works and Its Value: Users can search intuitively, save favorites, and instantly access forms as fillable PDFs. Key client data auto-populates, slashing manual entry. The library is crowdsourced, meaning Tinubu digitizes forms submitted by its own user network, ensuring it remains the most comprehensive and current resource available.
- Key Benefits: Reduces bond issuance from days or hours to minutes; eliminates version control issues with automatic updates; and drastically cuts down on data entry errors.
Bond Importer and Bond Validation: Eliminating Manual Data Re-Entry
A significant portion of industry workflow involves carriers manually re-keying data from bonds sent by brokers. This feature, launching in 2026, will end that inefficiency at its source.
- What It Is: An automated tool that ingests externally created bonds, extracts and validates the data, and imports it directly into the carrier's Tinubu workflow queue.
- The Problem It Solves: Manual re-entry of bond data is a major source of operational cost, delay, and data corruption, which accounts for a significant volume of support tickets.
- How It Works and Its Value: The tool uses validation rules to check for completeness and accuracy upon import, flagging errors for review before the data enters the system. This creates a single unified workflow for all bonds, whether generated internally or externally, eliminating dual data entry and its associated errors.
- The Initial Release: This will import bordereau files (CSV format) for non-renewing non-transactable bonds for record keeping. Tinubu has multiple customers that have thousands of these records a month, so eliminating the manual entry of them is highly significant to our customers. This will be followed by a release which supports new bonds in CSV format and a version which can import bonds in PDF form and a carrier's legacy bond portfolio.
- Key Benefits: Dramatically reduces manual work and data errors, accelerates processing speed, and unifies disparate workflows into one streamlined process.
Next-Gen Ratings Engine: Transparent, Accurate, and Future-Proof Pricing
Premium calculation is complex, involving base rates, fees, taxes, and commissions. Tinubu's rebuilt Ratings Engine brings new levels of speed, transparency, and control to this core function. This feature will be available in 2026.
- What It Is: The sophisticated engine within Tinubu's platform that automatically calculates bond premiums, integrating all carrier-defined rates, fees, surcharges, commissions, and state tax regulations.
- The Problem It Solves: Manual premium calculation is slow, complex, and prone to error, while legacy systems often act as black boxes, generating results with workings that are hard to verify.
- How It Works and Its Value: The new engine provides full visibility into every element affecting the final premium. It also allows for smarter overrides (adjusting the rate logic rather than just the final number) and clearly tracks all premium adjustments and endorsements over a bond's life for perfect auditability.
- Key Benefits: Ensures pricing accuracy and compliance, provides complete audit trails, and offers unmatched transparency for business analysis and decision-making.
Bond Link: An AI-Powered Solution to Automate Surety Bond Processing
- Around 40% of all Surety bond transactions are currently executed outside of a carrier’s official System of Record, often arriving as PDFs whose contents have to be manually entered into a carrier’s system. This process is costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. Bondlink is a new standalone solution that uses AI to eliminate this bottleneck.
What It Is: An AI engine that automatically reads, interprets, and extracts data from bond documents then imports that information into a carrier’s system in the correct format.
- The Problem It Solves: Manual bond data entry costs time and money and leads to errors.
- How It Works and Its Value: The AI is trained on real Surety data: it is currently in pilot with a major North American Surety carrier that, up til now, has had to manually key in 30,000 bid bond forms each year. BondLink will reduce this manual work by at least 75%.
- Key Benefits: BondLink is platform agnostic: it can be used by any carrier using any Surety system, not just Tinubu’s platform. Accuracy will be significantly improved, and the ROI derived from the large reduction in manual work will be swift.
A Cohesive Platform for Modern Surety
The capabilities described here don’t come from isolated tools; they are interconnected components of a unified strategy to modernize Surety operations. Tinubu provides a comprehensive path to greater efficiency, accuracy, and growth, and drives a tangible return on investment.
By automating the routine and complex, Tinubu allows Surety carrier customers to redirect their expertise toward high-value relationships and strategic underwriting, securing a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving and expanding market.
For a demo of Tinubu’s purpose-built Surety platform, email suretysales@tinubu.com.
