Skip to main content
SuretyScience

PETITION SUPPORTING SURETY INDUSTRY STANDARDS

The Specifics

​​I, the undersigned, believe it is time to modernize traditional Surety processes and streamline the flow of information within the Surety industry. Outdated reporting cycles, fragmented data sources, and manual processes create unnecessary friction, increase risk, and limit the ability to collaborate effectively.

The Surety Blueprint initiative published by SuretyScience represents a necessary step forward. Link: https://suretyscience.ai/blueprint 

By advancing real‑time, standardized, automated data exchange across the Surety ecosystem, this initiative aims to bring greater transparency, accuracy, and efficiency to everyone.

I petition industry stakeholders to support and adopt the Surety Blueprint so that together we can:
  • Promote modern data standards that eliminate redundant manual reporting and improve information quality.
  • Strengthen trust and communication between Principals, Obligees, Agencies, and Sureties.
  • Accelerate innovation in surety underwriting, monitoring, and risk assessment.
  • Reduce risk and uncertainty through timely, data‑driven insights.

Why This Matters

The insurance industry is rapidly digitizing, yet surety‑relevant data remains trapped in spreadsheets, PDFs, and legacy workflows. By supporting the Surety Blueprint, we take meaningful steps toward:
  • Improving industry resilience
  • Driving greater Surety premium growth
  • Lowering operational costs
  • Increasing decision and issuance velocity
  • Reducing Risk & Fraud

My Commitment

By adding my name to this petition, I endorse the mission and vision of the Surety Blueprint and affirm my support for its widespread adoption across the industry.  I believe that embracing modern data practices will create a stronger, more transparent, and more reliable surety ecosystem.

I respectfully urge industry leaders, associations, policymakers, and technology partners to join us in advancing this essential initiative.


​​I, the undersigned, believe that universal, real‑time verification of surety bonds is essential to protecting stakeholders, reducing fraud, and improving efficiency across the surety ecosystem. Today, bond validation and status checks often depend on manual outreach—phone calls, emails, and ad‑hoc requests—that delay decisions and create inconsistent outcomes for obligees, principals, agents, and carriers. 

The Bond Verification Standards, proposed by SuretyScience, outlines practical paths toward a common solution—including insurer self‑verification portals, alignment with trusted bond authentication workflows where applicable, and the pursuit of a Universal Surety Bond Number (USBN) to resolve overlapping numbering schemes. We support this direction and call for collaborative action to make standardized, self‑service bond verification a reality.  Link: https://www.suretyscience.ai/bond-verification

We petition stakeholders to commit to the following actions:

Adopt insurer self‑verification as a baseline capability
Each surety insurer should maintain a public, authoritative verification page that confirms bond validity and status via secure lookup (e.g., bond number + minimal corroborating fields), with the URL cited on executed bond documents.

Publish and align with a common data schema
Collaboratively define a minimal, standardized response (e.g., bond number/USBN, writing company, principal, obligee, bond type, effective/expiration dates, current status, last‑updated timestamp) to enable consistent machine‑readable verification across carriers and platforms.

Advance a Universal Surety Bond Number (USBN).
Establish governance for a globally unique identifier that prevents number collisions across carriers and systems, facilitating cross‑platform validation and auditability. [suretyscience.ai]

Integrate with trusted industry directories and contacts.
Continue to honor established verification practices—such as obligee/owner outreach to carrier contacts—while transitioning to standardized self‑service. Reference directories (e.g., SFAA’s Bond Verification Contact Directory) during the transition phase.

Ensure security, privacy, and auditability
Limit verification responses to status‑relevant fields (no personal sensitive data), provide tamper‑evident timestamps, and log access for compliance. This mirrors best practices used by carriers that already enable limited public status checks.

Promote interoperability and open access
Offer both human‑readable web pages and documented APIs to support obligees, agencies, procurement systems, and regulators—without paywalls for basic verification. 

Why now

  • Risk reduction & fraud prevention: Rapid, independent validation curbs counterfeit or altered instruments and accelerates dispute resolution. 
  • Operational efficiency: Self‑service verification replaces manual email/phone cycles, improving turnaround for bids, permitting, and contract award decisions. 
  • Industry consistency: A shared standard complements long‑standing verification practices (e.g., SFAA contact‑based checks) while modernizing the process for today’s digital workflows.

My Commitment

By signing, I endorse the SuretyScience Bond Verification Standards initiative and pledge to:
Participate in working groups to refine the common schema and USBN governance

I call on carriers, agencies, obligees, associations, and technology partners to join us in establishing universal, real‑time bond verification—turning fragmented, manual processes into a transparent, trustworthy, and efficient industry standard.


​​To Sureties, Agencies, Brokers, Software Providers, Accounting Firms, Construction Principals, Industry Associations, and Regulatory Stakeholders:

I, the undersigned, advocate for the industry‑wide adoption of standardized, efficient, and reliable processes for collecting and analyzing contractor Financial Statements and Work‑in‑Progress (WIP) reports. Today, the Surety industry continues to rely on outdated, fragmented, and highly manual workflows that impede underwriting accuracy, delay decisions, and introduce unnecessary risk.

The industry still lacks a streamlined, standardized approach for collecting these essential documents, leading to unnecessary operational burden, inconsistent data quality, and widespread inefficiencies.

Why a Standard is Needed

Current approaches to collecting Financial Statements and WIPs require significant manual intervention—frequently involving unsecured emails, PDFs in unstructured formats, and costly reconciliation work. This leads to:

  • Greater Risk: Insufficient data leads to less accurate underwriting decisions.
  • Revenue Leakage: Stale WIP reports delay recognition of additional earned premium.
  • Increased Liability: Missing or outdated WIP details keep bonds open longer than necessary.

Despite many discussions and past initiatives, the problem persists industry‑wide.

Current Methods — and Their Limitations

  1. Manual Data Entry - Manual data entry may seem convenient for principals and agencies, but it places a significant burden on carriers. Underwriters or offshore support teams are often forced to re‑key large volumes of information—an inefficient process that drives up costs, increases the likelihood of human error, and slows underwriting and decision‑making cycles.
  2. Spreadsheet Templates - Spreadsheet templates are designed to create consistency, yet they are frequently modified or ignored in practice. Because principals and agencies resist repeatedly reformatting their reports to satisfy each carrier’s template, the intended standardization breaks down, resulting in inconsistent submissions and additional processing work.
  3. Document Intake / OCR & AI Solutions - While more advanced, OCR‑based systems remain expensive and prone to significant reconciliation requirements due to inconsistent input formats and error rates. Even AI‑assisted tools still demand substantial human oversight.

These challenges highlight the need for an industry‑driven framework that prioritizes data uniformity, security, automation, and universal acceptance.

My Petition

I call upon all stakeholders to support and participate in the Surety Financials & WIPs Standards Initiative by adopting and promoting an industry‑wide framework for standardized, automated reporting. Specifically, we urge the community to commit to the following:
  • Establish a universal, programmatically consumable financial and WIP data standard - A consistent structure—machine‑readable and interoperable—eliminates ambiguity, reduces reconciliation work, and accelerates underwriting.
  • Promote secure, non‑manual data intake mechanisms - Replace email and PDF workflows with structured digital submissions, enabling automated validation and ingestion.
  • Encourage software providers and accounting partners to support the standard- Construction accounting systems, CPA firms, agency platforms, and carrier systems should align to a single schema to avoid fragmentation.
  • Reduce risk by ensuring timelier insight into contractor performance - Greater visibility into financial results and WIP activity provides more accurate bond sizing, capacity monitoring, and early‑warning indicators. 
  • Create a more equitable environment for contractors - Standardization ensures fairness - especially for small, emerging, minority‑owned, and under‑resourced contractors—by reducing reporting complexity and compliance costs.
  • Enable long‑term industry modernization - Uniform data reduces costs, strengthens risk analytics, supports digital underwriting, and improves transparency throughout the surety lifecycle

My Commitment

By signing this petition, I endorse the SuretyScience Financials & WIPs industry initiative.
Link: https://www.suretyscience.ai/financials-wips

I affirm my belief that standardized financial and WIP reporting will:
  • Improve risk accuracy
  • Reduce administrative burden
  • Strengthen collaboration between principals, agencies, and carriers
  • Modernize the surety ecosystem
  • Enhance the resilience of the construction economy

I call on insurers, agencies, principals, professional associations, technology providers, and regulators to unite around this initiative and accelerate the adoption of standardized, automated Financial & WIP reporting across the entire Surety industry.


​​I, the undersigned member of the Surety industry, call for immediate adoption of a unified, machine‑readable standard for Surety Account‑Application data. Link: https://www.suretyscience.ai/account-application

The Problem

  • Applications arrive in inconsistent formats and require manual rekeying.
  • Web forms don’t integrate with underwriting systems.
  • Email remains the default transmission method—slow, insecure, and error‑prone.
  • ACORD forms exist but are underutilized and not consistently implemented.

What the Industry Needs
  • A standardized, ACORD‑based data structure for all Account Applications with variations for small, mid-market and large accounts.
  • Support for modern identifiers such as Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs).
  • Secure, authorized data transmission—not email.
  • Flexible, extensible schemas that reflect real underwriting workflows.

Why It Matters
  • Faster, more accurate underwriting
  • Reduced operational cost and error rates
  • True interoperability across insurers, agencies, and software platforms
  • A foundation for automation and digital transformation

My Request
I petition ACORD, insurers, agencies, and software vendors to commit to:
  1. Implementing machine‑readable ACORD Account‑Application data.
  2. Supporting extensible, modern data models.
  3. Enabling secure, standardized data exchange.
  4. Collaborating with domain experts to ensure accuracy and adoption.

The Surety industry cannot modernize without standardized data. I urge immediate action.

​​SURETY STANDARDS PETITION

Signing this petition in support of Surety standards is a meaningful way to champion modernization across the surety ecosystem. You signal industry demand for a more efficient, transparent, and technology‑enabled future in the Surety industry.

Sign The Petition