Specialty surety, direct.

What we do.

Surety One, Inc. underwrites surety and fidelity bonds — the financial guarantees businesses and plan trustees post when federal law, state law, contract, or court requires them to. Within that broad practice, ERISA fidelity bonds are one of our highest-volume products, and ERISA-Bonds.com exists to make that product accessible online without a broker, an aggregator, or a phone tree between the applicant and the underwriter who will sign the bond.

We are a specialty surety. The general-purpose insurance world tends to treat fidelity bonds as a sideline — bundled into broader commercial packages, processed through brokerage networks, repriced annually with little visibility into the underwriting logic. We do the opposite. Surety and fidelity is the entirety of what we write, every day, and ERISA bonds in particular are written with the same hands that have been writing them for two decades.

The practical consequence: when you submit an application to ERISA-Bonds.com, your file is reviewed by an underwriter who has seen thousands of similar plans, knows the shape of a clean Section 412 placement, recognizes the patterns that signal specialty underwriting, and can issue a binding quote in hours rather than weeks. There is no "send your file back to the carrier and wait" step. We are the carrier's general agent; we are the carrier's pen.

What makes us different

Direct, not brokered

Most plan sponsors who buy ERISA bonds buy them through a property & casualty broker, who places them with a surety, who in turn underwrites them. The chain has three layers and three sets of fees baked into the premium. ERISA-Bonds.com is the surety. There are no broker fees. The premium is set, the bond is issued, and the sponsor deals with us directly from application through claim.

Same-day issuance

Standard ERISA placements that meet our published eligibility criteria — qualified assets only, current effective date, no prior loss — are issued the same business day the application is submitted. Most are issued within hours. We can do this because the underwriting work happens once, in the rate filing, rather than file-by-file when speed matters most.

Specialty intake on tough placements

The complement to fast standard issuance is real specialty underwriting on the files that don't fit. Plans with prior loss history, retro-dating beyond 30 days, manuscript wording, ESOP transactions in litigation, multi-employer plans with complex governance — those files don't go through the standard online tool. They go to a hand-underwriter who reviews them personally, often with a phone call, and prices them on the actual file, not on a checkbox.

A real person, every time

We do not use AI chatbots for underwriting. We do not delegate first-pass review to associates with no authority to bind. The person reviewing your application is the person who will sign your bond. The person you reach when you call (800) 373-2804 during business hours is one of our underwriting team, not a call center.

Corporate structure

Surety One, Inc. operates as part of a focused group of specialty surety operations under common ownership. The structure exists to give Surety One operational flexibility to underwrite on behalf of multiple Treasury-listed carriers while concentrating expertise and accountability within a single licensed organization.

For more on carrier authorization, the U.S. Treasury T-List requirement, and the A.M. Best rating system, see our Licensing & Rating page.

Leadership

Surety One, Inc. was established by C. Constantin Poindexter, CEO of Janus Assurance Re, founding law partner of VSP Law, PLLC, and a thirty-year veteran of the surety industry. His experience underwriting fidelity, court, license-and-permit, and contract surety bonds across the United States and territorial markets spans decades. Poindexter authored The Contractor's Guide to Surety Bonds: A Primer on Contract Surety Bonding for Construction Professionals, a contract bond landmark publication, and bylines our pillar guide on everything "ERISA fidelity bonding". Surety One, Inc. operates under the leadership of Sharon M. Poindexter, AINS, AIS.

Geographic footprint

We are licensed and write bonds in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Our two physical offices are positioned to support continental U.S. operations and territorial markets:

• 5 W Hargett Street, 4th Floor, Raleigh, NC 27601 — primary U.S. office; all standard ERISA bond underwriting handled here.
• 404 Av De La Constitución, #708, San Juan, PR 00901 — territorial office serving Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; handles bonds where local statutory requirements diverge from federal ERISA requirements.

The territorial office matters because Puerto Rico and the USVI both have local insurance and surety law that occasionally interacts with the federal ERISA bond requirement. For most plans operating in the territories, the federal Section 412 bond is the same instrument issued the same way; in the small number of cases where local rules add a layer, our San Juan team handles the variance.

How to reach us

The fastest way to reach an underwriter is the toll-free line during East Coast business hours; the second-fastest is email, which routes directly to the underwriting queue.

We respond to every email submission the same business day. Most quotes arrive within hours. Most issued bonds are delivered the same business day the premium is received.