Insurtech
Tinubu Plans Surety Workflow Pilot With Five Firms in Q4 2026
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Insurance Innovation Reporter spoke with Vinod Kachroo, Head of Americas at Tinubu, about the Paris-based company's priorities at ITC Vegas 2026. Two initiatives stood out: a plan to link surety broker and carrier workflows through a shared digital channel, and the use of AI to accelerate product configuration inside the company's Skye specialty insurance platform.
The surety connectivity play
Surety bonds, which are financial guarantees that a party will fulfill a contractual obligation, currently require brokers to move between individual carrier portals to submit information, answer underwriting questions and receive decisions. Tinubu wants to collapse that into a single workflow it internally calls a "digital highway."
The idea is that a broker working with multiple carriers could handle all of that from within their existing Tinubu platform. Carrier rules would determine what information is needed, and any follow-up questions would flow through application programming interfaces, the software connections that let separate systems exchange data, directly into the broker's screen. AI would handle tasks such as pulling financial data, analyzing it and presenting results for an underwriter to review.
Kachroo described a scenario in which a broker could complete a bond arrangement while still meeting with the principal, the party whose obligations the bond covers, with cases needing human judgment routed to an underwriter inside the same connected workflow.
The pilot, set for the fourth quarter of 2026, would involve two large brokers and three carriers. Carriers would not need to replace their existing systems. "Use your own platform," Kachroo said. "Connect with me through the APIs you can give me because I want to drive the efficiency for you and I want to drive the efficiency for the broker."
He also argued that ease of doing business gives carriers a way to attract broker distribution without relying entirely on higher commissions, a point that will resonate with carriers watching their expense ratios.
AI in product configuration
On the specialty side, Tinubu announced version 11 of its Skye platform on the eve of ITC. The new version embeds AI into product configuration: describe a proposed insurance product or hand the system a business specification, and it draws on its knowledge base to draft a starting configuration.
Kachroo was careful to frame the division of labor. The AI generates configurations for the existing platform engine; the engine still handles the underlying processing, and people validate and complete what the AI produces. Tinubu says AI can generate more than 70 percent of the configuration a person would otherwise build manually. Kachroo presented expected reductions in development time and staffing requirements as expectations, not established customer results, a distinction the report was explicit about.
Skye v11 also handles submission workflows that take in case information, run it through an automated underwriting model and move to policy issuance when conditions are met, routing to a human reviewer when they are not.
What to watch
"A lot of people are doing AI for the sake of AI," Kachroo said. "That gives you no value." His consistent argument across both initiatives is that AI earns its place by reducing the work required to complete a transaction or bring a product to market, not by existing.
The Q4 pilot will be the first real test of whether the surety connectivity model holds up with live brokers and carriers. Whether carriers outside the Tinubu ecosystem are willing to open APIs to a third-party platform is the harder question, and the pilot results will matter well beyond surety. If the workflow model proves out, the same logic applies to any specialty line where brokers currently navigate multiple carrier portals.
Source: https://iireporter.com/itc-brief-tinubu-connects-surety-workflows-embeds-ai/
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