- SuretyBind, a Competitor Owned Surety Data Platform? Mmmmm, . . . not so sure about that.
A Competitor-Owned Surety Data Platform Is a Strategic and Counterintelligence Hazard
On December 8, 2025, Chubb, The Hartford, Liberty Mutual, and Travelers announced the formation of SuretyBind, LLC, a technology company intended to provide a shared digital infrastructure to advance the surety industry (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025; Carrier Management 2025). Public materials identify two initial priorities: a data transmission platform to connect sureties, brokers, and other participants in order to reduce duplicative data entry and improve data quality (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025), and secondarily, leadership and technology to drive digital bond execution, improve verification, and reduce fraud. Services are expected in 2027 (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025). The same announcement adds a sentence that should concern any serious surety executive. It states that all SuretyBind activities are conducted under “strict antitrust supervision” (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025).
I am pondering this from the standpoint of an ex-counterintelligence operator in the U.S. I.C., so this is going to be a bit technical, but I’ll try to keep out of the woods here. In competitive industries, shared infrastructure is frequently a precondition for avoidable compromise because it concentrates sensitive operational signals, creates asymmetric incentives, and widens the attack surface. In surety, underwriting edge is built from proprietary loss experience, contractor behavior signals, i.e., known red flags to a particular surety, claims handling patterns, indemnity enforcement outcomes, and relationship intelligence. Placing any portion of the workflow on a platform co-owned by direct competitors creates structural incentives and technical pathways for abuse or worse, conspiratorial market monopolization. Even if every participant acts in good faith, the platform becomes a high-value collection point for penetration. A single breach, insider compromise, governance failure, or gradual expansion of scope can expose trade secrets and reshape market dynamics.
What the public reporting says and what it does not
The best sourced reporting largely recirculates the same core statement. PR Newswire published the launch release on December 8, 2025 (PR Newswire 2025). SuretyBind’s own press page mirrors the same language and repeats the strict antitrust supervision claim without explaining its mechanics (SuretyBind 2025). Carrier Management adds an operational detail that is material for risk analysis. A SuretyBind representative said the four sureties funded the company and will be co-owners. Carrier Management also reported that the owners will not be providing personnel to the technology company, while still participating in an advisory capacity and ultimately becoming users of the platform (Carrier Management 2025). The Insurer also reported the formation, but provides limited additional substance in the portion broadly accessible (The Insurer 2025). That thin public record is itself a risk signal. A competitor-owned platform can be built safely only with explicit and auditable commitments on data boundaries, governance controls, technical segregation, and enforceable sanctions. The public materials provide none of that detail, while asking the market to trust the platform with sensitive traffic. In other words, the interested parties’ narrative emphasizes benefits while omitting the control framework that would allow counterparties to evaluate and judge the true risk.
“Strict antitrust supervision” is not a reassuring
The phrase appears to be self-described, not a reference to a defined government oversight program. The announcement does not cite a consent decree, a published monitor, a public compliance protocol, a set of scope limitations, or enforcement triggers (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025). In ordinary United States practice, antitrust agencies do not supervise day-to-day commercial conduct of a private joint venture absent a litigation resolution, order, or decree. Where companies seek agency feedback in advance, they may pursue structured options, however, that is not equivalent to continuous supervision. Actually, continuous supervision does not transform a risky design into a safe one either.
The current antitrust environment also matters. On December 11, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice withdrew the 2000 Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors, stating that the guidelines no longer provide reliable guidance and emphasizing case-by-case enforcement (FTC 2024; FTC and DOJ 2024). This shift increases uncertainty around competitor collaboration structures and heightens the need for precise internal controls rather than reliance on generic comfort language. Compliance programs must be designed for effectiveness, monitoring, and documentation. The Department of Justice Antitrust Division has also emphasized evaluation of compliance programs and their effectiveness in criminal antitrust investigations (DOJ Antitrust Division 2024).
From a counterintelligence guy’s view, antitrust is only one layer. A platform that aggregates competitor adjacent operational data flows can enable tacit coordination, whether intentional or not, by increasing market transparency around demand patterns, submission characteristics, broker behaviors, and execution timing. Even without explicit exchange of pricing (a definitive invitation for litigation or prosecution) granular operational signals can reduce uncertainty and soften competition.
The surety-specific danger is that operational data becomes underwriting intelligence
Some advocates may argue that the platform only transmits administrative data. In surety, that distinction is simply illusory. A data transmission platform that reduces duplicative entry implies common schemas, common routing, and shared pipes across sureties, brokers, and other parties (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025). Even if each surety maintains its own decisioning, several categories of intelligence can leak through metadata, workflow patterns, or integrations. Ponder these. Appetite inference. Which submissions are accepted into workflow, how fast they are processed, and what documentation is demanded can reveal risk tolerance by class, geography, contractor size, or obligee type. Surety broker and channel intelligence. Submission frequency, conversion rates, and timing reveal who controls deal flow and how competitors prioritize relationships. Loss cost signals. Even without explicit loss runs, claim-related workflow events, verification anomalies, amendment frequency, and execution delays can correlate with adverse development and portfolio stress. Process fingerprints. Digital execution embeds rules. Who requires what, when indemnity is tightened, when collateral is requested, and what exceptions are escalated are not merely operational details. They are strategic posture.
The eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Over time, data quality advantages become modeling advantages. A shared system standardizes the collection of variables that eventually become features in predictive analytics. Whoever influences the schema, sees its evolution, or observes which optional fields others request learns what competitors believe matters, and can calibrate their own strategies accordingly. The risk is not only an overt breach. It is a gradual normalization of shared visibility that erodes differentiation.
Digital execution and fraud reduction goals can be achieved without competitor-owned intelligence exposure
The industry’s fraud and verification concerns are real. Industry materials, including NASBP resources, describe persistent problems of fraudulent bonds and emphasize verification as a core control (NASBP 2024). The workflow is fragmented, and obligees often verify bonds through manual steps or portal checks, which creates latency and inconsistency. Improving verification and reducing fraud is a legitimate objective that could benefit the market (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025). However, governance and ownership models are not incidental. NASBP and RiskStream Collaborative have described digitizing the surety bond ecosystem through workflow standardization and stakeholder coordination (NASBP and RiskStream 2025). That goal does not logically require a competitor-owned central platform that becomes the market’s operational nervous system. The industry can pursue interoperability standards, verification registries, and secure execution rails in ways that compartmentalize each surety’s proprietary underwriting and claims intelligence. Of course, being the surety world’s “operational nervous system” may be the entire point. I’ll leave that one and its ramifications for you to ponder, especially those carriers that will not use the platform.
A threat model for participation
If I were advising a surety carrier evaluating participation, I would treat the platform as a high-threat environment even if the stated intent is benign. The incentives are asymmetric, and the attack surface is large, . . . huge counterintelligence concerns in more than just the insurance sector. Competitor collection risk arises when competitors can shape platform features, influence schema, participate in advisory structures, or obtain privileged visibility into operational telemetry. Insider threat risk grows because platform employees and contractors can access logs, routing rules, support tickets, and integration configurations, any of which can reveal proprietary posture. Supply chain risk rises because shared infrastructure tends to accumulate dependencies, and one compromised vendor can expose all participants. Design spillover risk is persistent because once multi party rails exist, there is continuous pressure to add analytics, benchmarking, fraud scoring, and dashboards, each framed as helpful, each capable of crossing the line into competitive intelligence. Finally, regulatory and litigation discovery risk expands because centralized logs and shared repositories become new targets for subpoenas and discovery demands.
What can surety companies do to protect proprietary underwriting and claims intelligence?
Participation should be conditioned on controls that are technical, contractual, and governance-based, designed for non-trust operation. Trust is not a control. So what to do?
Data minimization must be an enforced technical requirement. Only transmit fields strictly necessary for a defined transaction. Underwriting conclusions, internal risk grades, pricing logic, claim narratives, indemnity enforcement outcomes, and loss development artifacts should be prohibited by design and validated automatically against a published data dictionary. This is the surety equivalent of compartmentation, a well-known practice in the intelligence field.
Tenant isolation and clean room architecture are imperative. If the platform evolves beyond simple message passing, there must be cryptographic and architectural isolation with separate keys, separate storage, separate processors, strict access controls, and provable segmentation. Controls should align to recognized baselines such as NIST SP 800 53 Rev 5 for access control, audit logging, and system integrity (NIST 2020).
Immutable and independently reviewable auditability must be assured. All access to production data and logs should be recorded in a tamper-evident manner and reviewable by each participant, with thresholds for alerting and independent oversight. Require third-party security assessments and continuous monitoring aligned to recognized governance frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 (NIST 2024).
Governance designed to prevent competitor capture must be rigorous. A board with one seat per owner can institutionalize competitor influence rather than mitigate it. Demand an independent data governance body with veto power over schema changes, analytics features, and any cross-tenant functionality. A “one seat per JV participant” would be highly attractive to parties seeking to engage in behavior specifically prohibited by antitrust laws. Require formal change control with notice, impact analysis, and opt-out rights. Enforce purpose limitation at the governance layer so the platform cannot evolve into an intelligence lake by incremental decisions.
Antitrust compliance that is operationally real, if such a thing is even possible among the biggest players in an extreme niche sector. Given the shift to case-by-case scrutiny and the withdrawal of prior collaboration guidelines, antitrust must be treated as an ongoing operational risk, not a meaningless annual training module (FTC 2024; FTC and DOJ 2024). Implement monitored governance communications, documented escalation paths, and clear prohibitions on competitively sensitive exchanges. Use DOJ Antitrust Division compliance expectations as the reference model for program design and effectiveness testing (DOJ Antitrust Division 2024).
Contractual non-use and trade secret remedies with teeth. Simple non-disclosure will not work. Contracts should include purpose limitation, non-use clauses that prohibit competitive use, model training, and benchmarking, strong audit rights, rapid incident disclosure duties, and immediate injunctive relief triggers. Meaningful sanctions and termination rights for non-compliance must be built in. If the platform is essential to business operations, remedies that are practical and swift can serve as a deterrent.
Restrictions on personnel mixing and advisory interfaces are also important controls. The reporting that owners will not provide personnel is appropriate and should be preserved (Carrier Management 2025). Carrier participants must ban secondments of surety underwriters, claims staff, and analytics personnel into the platform operator. Advisory structures must be tightly scoped and closely monitored, as working groups can easily become informal intelligence exchanges.
All schemas and workflow rules must be viewed as highly sensitive. Even if no explicit loss data is stored, schema evolution can reveal competitive strategy. Any new data element must be justified as necessary for execution or verification and reviewed for competitive sensitivity. Red lines must include prohibition of any feature that compares participants or infers any market posture.
The structure must provide an exit capability and assume that a breach is inevitable. A robust counterintelligence posture assumes compromise will happen at some point. Rapid disengagement rights, verified data deletion and destruction, and integration architectures that allow a surety to disconnect without crippling operations are imperative. In parallel, keep internal systems compartmentalized so that a platform breach does not escalate into an enterprise breach.
My Parting Thoughts
SuretyBind’s stated objectives are understandable. Efficiency, data quality, digital execution, verification, and fraud reduction are legitimate targets (PR Newswire 2025; SuretyBind 2025). The danger lies in the ownership and incentive structure. Direct competitors are being invited to co-own the rails on which submissions, execution events, and workflow metadata will travel. Data/metadata is intelligence, workflow is strategy, and administrative is often the shadow of underwriter judgment. A single sentence about strict antitrust supervision is b.s., and NOT an adequate substitute for verifiable safeguards, particularly in an enforcement environment that emphasizes case-by-case scrutiny and has withdrawn prior competitor collaboration guidelines (FTC 2024; FTC and DOJ 2024). A counterintelligence professional does not gamble trade secrets on slogans, and neither should the participant sureties in this SuretyBind thing. If the industry truly wants digital execution, it should demand designs that keep each surety’s proprietary risk knowledge compartmented, minimize shared visibility, and make governance auditable and enforceable. Otherwise, the platform risks becoming an intelligence extraction engine that quietly redistributes underwriting advantage from those who earned it to those who can most effectively collect or acquire it. Non-participating surety companies beware. There are four very large, very influential carriers banding together for reasons that don’t appear to justify the concerning exposures inherent in the system. You should ask why.
~ C. Constantin Poindexter, MA, JD, CPCU, AFSB, ASLI, ARe
References
- Carrier Management. 2025. “Chubb, The Hartford, Liberty and Travelers Team Up on Surety Tech Co. Launch.” December 8, 2025.
- Federal Trade Commission. 2024. “FTC and DOJ Withdraw Guidelines for Collaboration Among Competitors.” Press release, December 11, 2024.
- Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice. 2024. Withdrawal Statement: Guidelines for Collaboration Among Competitors. December 11, 2024.
- National Association of Surety Bond Producers. 2024. The Importance of Surety Bond Verification.
- National Association of Surety Bond Producers and RiskStream Collaborative. 2025. Digitizing the Surety Bond Ecosystem: Surety X Executive Summary. June 2025.
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. 2020. Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations (SP 800 53 Rev. 5).
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. 2024. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 (CSWP 29).
- PR Newswire. 2025. “Leading Sureties Announce the Launch of SuretyBind.” December 8, 2025.
- SuretyBind. 2025. “Leading Sureties Announce the Launch of SuretyBind.” Press release page, December 8, 2025.
- U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division. 2024. Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations. November 2024.
- The Insurer (from Reuters). 2025. “Tech company SuretyBind formed by Chubb, The Hartford, Liberty Mutual and Travelers.” December 8, 2025.
C. Constantin Poindexter Salcedo
My Opinions & Mis Penamientos