The Surety market is growing fast, and that growth is exposing the limits of how most carriers operate today. That was the throughline of a recent keynote from Everest Group’s Ronak Doshi and Aaditya Jain, who attended Tinubu Surety’s Customer Advisory Board (CAB) to share independent market research on where the industry is heading.
CAB is Tinubu's annual gathering where carrier clients help shape the platform's direction. This year's event brought Surety professionals together to align on where the industry is going and what Tinubu is building to help get it there, from AI-enabled underwriting to real-time data APIs. Everest Group’s keynote grounded those product conversations in a broader market view: what's driving growth, where the bottlenecks are, and what carriers need to capture the opportunity.
The Everest Group Keynote Address
A Growing Market With New Pressure Points
Everest Group opened with good news: the Surety business is growing fast. The global Surety market is estimated at $22–23 billion in 2025, projected to reach $29–30 billion by 2030 at a 5–7% CAGR. The U.S. accounts for 45–47% of global premiums.
That dominant position is underpinned by four structural factors: the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure program (IIJA) driving sustained public project demand; a 10–15% year-over-year rise in submissions from mid-market contractors; expansion into energy, specialty lines, and international geographies; and capital constraints pushing more principals toward Surety as an alternative to bank-backed instruments.
The Productivity Gap
Capturing this growth is becoming harder, and technology is both the bottleneck and the unlocking mechanism. Everest Group presented a striking productivity gap among Surety carriers: the median carrier requires 5–7 FTEs per $10M in GWP, while top-quartile carriers operate with fewer than 3. That 2–3x gap is fundamentally a technology and workflow problem.
Supporting data points from the keynote:
- New-client contract bonds still take 3–5 days on average
- 76% of insurers cite manual indemnity review as a top-three throughput bottleneck
- Only 5% of insurers report full integration across quoting, issuance, and claims
Distribution Has Shifted
Meanwhile, the distribution landscape has shifted. Broker consolidation has concentrated influence at the top. Seventy percent of the Top 100 U.S. broker revenue now sits with just 10 firms. And brokers have changed how they operate. They've moved from following carrier appetite to setting the pace on speed, transparency, and ease of placement. Carriers that can't meet those expectations risk losing placement, even in a growing market.
From Systems of Record to Systems of Orchestration
The core shift Everest Group pointed to is from systems of record to systems of orchestration: platforms that coordinate workflows across the Surety lifecycle, surfacing next-best actions in real time, automating low-complexity tasks, and allowing human underwriters to focus on judgment. AI, Everest noted, is the next lever for operating leverage, but for it to scale properly, it must sit on top of structured data and digital workflows, not emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets.
Not All AI Paths Are Equal
Everest Group distinguished three AI paths: individual productivity tools, AI embedded in existing tech stacks, and full workflow transformation via agentic systems. Not every path delivers the same value.
The highest-impact AI use cases in Surety sit at the intersection of high potential and high complexity. These include financial review, risk assessment, submission intake, and portfolio monitoring. Capturing that value requires the right underlying platform.
Build vs. Buy: TCO Determines Winners
The keynote closed with a pointed observation on build vs. buy: total cost of ownership, not cost to build, determines winners. Maintaining proprietary technology creates a compounding burden. Carriers take on infrastructure costs, ongoing model upgrades, AI tooling, integration debt, and competition for scarce talent. That burden is viable only for the top three to five carriers. For the rest of the market, embedded AI within purpose-built platforms is the path to scale.
Everest Group’s message was that the Surety market’s growth is real, and so are the structural pressures: the time to modernize operating models is now.
