Surety Agent

Your objective to secure the best possible surety program for your clients can be accomplished in part by making your agency able to manage portable data. The better your clients surety program and the more cost effective your administration of that program, the more profitable your company will be.

Establishing a surety program

Your clients’ surety program is established by collecting data from your client, processing that information, and first developing a presentation to your surety markets followed by an ongoing flow of information. The CHICO process strives to demonstrate a way to develop a procedure to make your clients data “portable”. This will allow the data to be imported and processed by your surety agent and forwarded to your surety market in a way that reduces redundant data entry and promotes multiple surety market participation. Your objective to secure the best possible surety program for your clients can be accomplished in part by making your company capable of managing portable data.

There are a number of commercially available surety agency management systems that could manage the portable data as envisioned, and the CHICO Process goal is to generate the demand that justifies their adapting their respective systems for a uniform industry wide method.

Pre-Bid

The CHICO process requires the project owner to provide basic project information for contractors on their website in a downloadable file using industry adopted open standards. Whether they are a prime contractor or a subcontractor they can access project information from the owner’s website and forward the project information to your surety agency.

Most contractors use some form of a bid management. These can range from a simple excel spreadsheet to more comprehensive commercial applications. Getting the project data to import into those applications is not difficult, and can be accomplished by mapping the fields, or a simple cut and paste. Those applications can also be made to export the project data by someone with basic knowledge of computers.

If your contractor clients do not have a bid management application that can import/export the project data can sign up for Bid List Connection, a very basic application that not only helps manage them bidding schedule, but acts as a communication tool to pass along (export) the data to you as their surety agent.

Bid Submission to Owner

There are various examples of electronic surety transactions currently in use and the surety industry is developing the policies and procedures for a nationwide electronic surety transaction structure. No matter what direction this development takes, it will always require the basic project and contractor data in a digital format. The CHICO process demonstrates how that data could be standardized to promote and encourage that development.

Your client’s data, added to the project data they exported to you, provides the information your surety agency needs for processing the bond request and will be the foundation for an electronic surety bid bond.

Project award

When your client is the successful bidder on a project your agency system will already have most of the information necessary for issuing the final bond because of the earlier import of the bid information.

Your surety agency will add the additional information required for conversion to a final bond, and for exporting that revised data to the surety and/or repository.

Project Risk Management

The CHICO process is more than just moving bid data between your contractor client and your surety agency. It also involves establishing an ongoing link to that data during the progress of the project. Access to ongoing project data will have a significant beneficial impact to the ability of surety companies to monitor their portfolio of projects and improve their underwriting results.

When you provide “portable” data at the outset, your surety can efficiently and cost effectively deliver your agency the best surety program possible for your clients, and your agency can provide better service to your clients as well.

Your project can be monitored by the surety using the links originally provided during the bidding process. This gives the surety more flexibility in the underwriting process, allowing them to extend the surety credit your clients deserve.

Summary

Some of the main objectives of the CHICO process are to:

• Demonstrate how construction project data can be "portable".



• Engage participating university students in educational opportunities through exploration and development of Business Information Modeling for the administration of surety programs.



• Demonstrate efficient use of evolving technologies through data portability to promote an enhanced surety underwriting environment thereby improving access to surety credit for contractors.



• Create a surety based risk management capability for project owners and/or general contractors though the efficient use of subcontract bonds.



• Promote the development of commercially viable applications that can participate anywhere along the life cycle of a construction project as a result of the broad adoption of open standards.