An Intelligent Connection Between Brokers and Carriers
Distribution is the single biggest lever a carrier has for growth. The easier it is for a broker to write and place a bond, the more of that broker's business a carrier will see. Brokers sit at the center of Surety growth.
Realizing efficiency gains and improving the risk on a carrier's book means supporting both sides of the transaction, not just the carrier's. Tinubu recognized that early and built accordingly: Tinubu Surety for Brokers & Agents (TSBA), our agency management system, is used by 14 of the 15 leading brokers and handles more than 60 percent of agency-side bond flow.
For carriers, that scale means something concrete. Most of your business is already being written inside TSBA before it ever reaches you.*
The Key to Unlocking Efficiency
Surety has the lowest combined ratios in insurance yet some of the highest expense ratios. The key to improving expense ratios is in the workflow and hand-offs between broker and carrier workflows: the receiving, checking, re-keying, and correcting of bonds, all done by people whose valuable time would be better spent putting actual business on the books.
Tinubu has focused on rebuilding the core infrastructure for contract bonds, the most complex segment of the Surety business, so carriers can scale without scaling headcount. AI agents take over document ingestion and validation, and every pricing component becomes a visible, real-time line item instead of a black box. Underwriters spend their time assessing risk, not on data collection.
The next step: a digital highway that connects TSBA directly to carrier systems, so bond data moves from submission to issuance without being re-typed, and rates and underwriting questions reach agents the moment they happen.
"Right now there is a great deal of reconciliation in this business," says Rahul Guha, CTO of Surety at Tinubu. "Someone says the premium should be one figure, and when it is properly calculated it is another. There is an accuracy problem and a speed problem, and a lot of back-and-forth in between. The digital highway pulls the latest rates and the latest underwriting questions through APIs, and the bond is created correctly in the carrier system. Once it is written, it is written."
Built for Brokers, Benefiting Carriers
Tinubu's Digital Highway is a direct, API-based connection between a broker's system and a carrier's platform. For a carrier, a submission arrives as a completed bond, already validated against the carrier's own rules, inside the carrier's own systems.
The saving extends beyond the clerical. Data moves directly from source to system, so it stays accurate. Rates propagate automatically from the carrier, so every bond reflects current pricing.
“We can create a level of efficiency where a carrier underwriter is spending less than 10 minutes on a case and truly doing risk assessment, rather than spending 10 hours going back and forth trying to exchange data and emails and scanning documents,” says Vinod Kachroo, Head of Americas at Tinubu. “We want underwriters to be underwriting.”
The Digital Highway starts from the broker's side, not the carrier's. That design choice is why it works.
“Tinubu's broker platform wasn't designed from a carrier's perspective, which is typically how these capabilities get rolled out," Kachroo says. “We put the broker at the center, figured out what a day in the life of a broker looks like, and made that work easier and more seamless. Carrier requirements still get met. They just arrive inside the system the agent already uses.”
Why This Makes a Carrier More Attractive
Surety Outlook 2025 found that speed and service are recurring factors in which carriers brokers choose to work with, with good service and modern technology among the top reasons brokers pick one carrier over another. On the flip side, carriers named complete submissions as one of the top factors when choosing which brokers to work with. The digital highway supports the needs of both sides.
A broker sitting in front of a contractor who needs four bonds is thinking about one thing: how fast those bonds can be issued. Speed becomes the deciding factor, and carriers on the highway win.
"We are making brokers' lives easy, which helps the carriers that are on the highway, because now they become more attractive to the broker," says Guha. "In the long run, this should increase their revenue."
Kachroo makes the same point in terms of the operating model. "Ease of doing business for brokers means a simpler process for the carriers and, in many cases, more business for the carriers. So carriers should be able to grow their business at a high level of profitability, and potentially offer better commissions to brokers if they wish to."
Connecting All Carriers
The highway is compatible with all carrier systems, not just Tinubu's.
"If a carrier has their own system, we can easily connect to it via APIs,” says Guha. “Then they receive all the connectivity benefits of the highway, straight into their existing system. After all, a road that only serves one manufacturer's vehicles would not be much of a highway."
Carriers running their own systems have already seen how this works in practice. Tinubu's headless API lets a carrier keep its own agent-facing portal while Tinubu's engine handles rating and issuance underneath it. Its real-time data APIs replaced the overnight batch file with bond data that moves the moment it changes. The highway extends that same principle to the submission itself, the last stretch of the process to go digital.
A Standard Nobody Has to Ratify
The Surety industry has spent years trying to standardize interoperability through committees and shared formats. Agreeing to a standard is the easy part. Getting the entire market to implement it is the hard part.
"You can create standards till cows come home," says Kachroo. "But how do you implement them? How do you work with everyone? It's a long cycle."
Tinubu took a different path: meeting the industry where it already is. A connection most Surety brokers already use doesn't require ratification. It only requires a carrier to connect to it. "As a carrier, if you get on the highway, you are a standard," says Kachroo.
