Roughly 30% of bonds in the U.S. are written on carrier paper but executed entirely outside that carrier’s system — issued through an agent’s platform, a third-party portal, or a manual process that answers to nobody’s workflow but the agent’s own. The bond is legally in force. But it arrives at the carrier not as usable data, but as a document that must be manually entered into the carrier’s system of record.
In a U.S. Surety market that wrote nearly $10 billion in premiums in 2023 and has been growing steadily, that’s a lot of people doing a lot of manual transcription. It's also a problem we're about to solve.
Why Bonds Are Born Outside Carrier Systems
Surety has always operated through delegated authority: agents are empowered, by formal agreement, to issue bonds on behalf of carriers without direct carrier involvement. A bond can be executed entirely outside carrier systems in formats the carrier didn't design.
A bond typically arrives in one of two forms: an executed bond form PDF, or a CSV data file (known as a bordereau). Both contain what the carrier needs. Neither can enter a system on its own. "The carrier needs to know what transactions the agent or broker has executed," says Jason Callison, Customer Solution Architect at Tinubu, "but when they get that record, they have to manually enter all of it — principal information, obligee information, bond amount, commission, agency."
The Scale and the Stakes
For commercial bonds, keying a single record might take minutes. Contract bonds — the largest Surety segment — can run 20 pages. One Tinubu customer keys roughly 40,000 bid bond applications annually. Another processed 19,000 transactions from a single distribution channel in twelve months.
The consequences extend beyond labor costs. A bond that isn't in the system doesn't operationally exist — it won't appear in exposure reporting, reinsurance filings, or regulatory submissions. “The carrier needs it for reporting, to know their overall exposure, and to feed into downstream billing systems,” says Callison. “It’s also about knowing what they’re ultimately responsible for if there’s ever a claim.”
Manual data entry carries a typical error rate of 1%, with complex documents pushing toward 4%. Those errors don't surface as administrative inconveniences — caught at claims time, they become exposure problems. "If you have a claim and your project information is not accurate," Callison says, "you will have issues on what your exposure is."
The window between issuance and ingestion creates a blind spot. During the time a bond sits in the keying queue, it’s invisible to the carrier’s systems. It won’t appear in exposure reporting or aggregate risk analysis. Reinsurance filings, regulatory submissions, internal audits: all of it reflects most of the book, but not all of it.
Carriers build around this. But building around a gap is not the same as closing it.
Something's Coming
Carriers investing in data-driven underwriting and portfolio analytics are only as good as their ingested book. A book where a third of bonds enter through manual keying — with the delays and errors that implies — is a weaker foundation than one where every bond, regardless of origin, enters through a consistent, automated process.
We're building that process. BondImport.ai — Tinubu's new AI-powered bond ingestion product — is launching May 2026. Connect via API or upload a PDF/CSV, review AI-extracted data side by side with the source, and export a validated record into any system of record. No custom development. No transcription errors. No blind spots in your book.
The manual ingestion problem has existed long enough to feel inevitable. It isn't. More details coming soon — book a demo to be first in line: suretysales@tinubu.com.
