Surety One Launches CommercialCrimePolicy.com to Streamline Commercial Crime Insurance and Fidelity Bonds

Surety One, Inc., an international surety intermediary and underwriter, announced the launch of CommercialCrimePolicy.com, a standalone platform for commercial crime insurance and fidelity bonds. The site gives interested parties a plain-English guide to coverage and a fully online application that delivers a signed, carrier-ready submission to Surety One's underwriters in minutes.

Commercial crime insurance reimburses an organization for money, securities, and property lost to employee theft, forgery, computer fraud, funds transfer fraud, and by endorsement, social engineering. It is the fidelity bond of a century ago, broadened by the Surety & Fidelity Association of America and the national carriers into a multi-peril form. The new platform is built around that point, because the question reaches Surety One's underwriting desk every week: is a commercial crime policy the same thing as a fidelity bond?

"The answer is a qualified yes, and the qualification is where buyers get lost," said C. Constantin Poindexter, founder of Surety One, Inc. "The commercial crime policy is the fidelity bond under a more current moniker, the forms being standardized so that they are acceptable to insurance commissioners in every jurisdiction as fidelity bonds. What remains distinct are the statutory instruments, the ERISA bond, the FINRA Form 14, the business services bond. The Surety One, Inc. Team built CommercialCrimePolicy.com to explain the difference clearly and to route each buyer to the right product."

The exposure the coverage answers is not small. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that organizations lose five percent of annual revenue to occupational fraud, with a median loss of $145,000 per case and a median of twelve months before detection. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported business email compromise losses approaching three billion dollars in 2023. Commercial property forms exclude dishonest acts by employees, general liability answers third-party claims rather than the theft of an insured's own funds, and cyber policies frequently exclude or sublimit the transfer of money. The commercial crime policy is the form the industry built for the trusted insider and the impostor on the phone.

CommercialCrimePolicy.com offers three online applications: the commercial crime standard business coverage application for organizations insuring their internal perils, the third party fidelity bond application for consultants, attorneys, technology firms and contractors working on client premises, and the business services (dishonesty) bond application for janitorial, home care, pet sitting, handyman, moving and similar trades. Each application ends with a multi-jurisdictional attestation and electronic signature, generates a formatted PDF the applicant keeps, and delivers automatically to Surety One's underwriters. The commercial crime application also screens for the internal control standard fidelity underwriting has always required, i.e., separation of duties, routing CPA review, etc.

Said Sharon M. Poindexter, President of Surety One, Inc., "We receive a lot of applications that we simply can't approve, not because the applicant is uninsurable but because they don't understand things like the separation of duties and answer our questionnaire incorrectly. We built in a tool that blocks the application flow right there, and we prompt the applicant to look more carefully at the application before submission. It's a time-saver for us, and it's a learning opportunity for the insured."

The platform includes a comparison of the commercial crime policy, the ERISA fidelity bond and the business services bond; a guide to who needs coverage, from nonprofits and property managers to specialty lenders and broker dealers; supplemental questionnaires for attorneys, hospitals, insurers, managing general agents, third party administrators, trucking firms and warehouses; a glossary of fidelity and crime terms; and direct routes to Surety One's sister platforms for the ERISA bond at ERISA-Bonds.com, the FINRA Form 14 at BrokerDealerBond.com and the mortgage banker bond at MortgageBankersBond.com. A senior underwriter opens every file the same business day.