Propeller Prioritizes Underwriting Speed + Precision with RiskOps

Early on in the company’s growth, the Propeller team recognized that they needed a scalable platform on which to organize their underwriting operations. After evaluating several options, Propeller chose Federato for its configurability and scalability.

“The work we would need to do to power our business on a legacy technology provider would be completely cost prohibitive. Some were asking us to connect our proprietary systems to a 20-year-old API. Then Federato came to us and said, ‘What do you need? How do we connect to you?’ Now we're doing cutting-edge, real-time data sharing with them. That was a game changer for us.”

- Chris Kolger, Co-CEO, Propeller Bonds

The challenge

Propeller’s growth kicked off quickly when they started writing business in 2020, as the surety industry realized how much easier it was to write and access bonds through Propeller’s new digital service. They soon had to hire more staff to keep up, and to enable those staff to make quick, accurate underwriting decisions. They needed a platform that could scale to support the growth of their client base, keep their underwriters aligned, and keep their capacity providers up to date with the trajectory and discipline of their business.

“We didn’t have a single place for all of our documentation; it was all in our heads or buried in emails, and it wasn’t integrated as part of our workflow. We were stepping on each other’s toes, and as we continued to grow, we realized that if we didn’t fix the problem now, it would snowball into something major later.” 

- Konae C. Mignott, CPCU, AFSB, Chief Operating Officer, Propeller Bonds

The solution

Propeller conducted broad research across technology providers and decided to deploy on Federato. Federato’s platform met the technical needs of Propeller’s front-end portal, and could support their specific underwriting workflow. And while most other technology solutions would require Propeller to engage in an expensive and lengthy technical build-out to achieve their goals, Federato offered a flexible platform and a high level of service to help Propeller get deployed and win the right deals faster. 

Propeller first rolled out Federato for their underwriter operations, in which most bonds move through straight-through-processing while underwriters handle the more complex submissions. Soon after, Propeller deployed Federato’s Partner Portal product to power their white-label bond portal for agents.

“Our goal is to streamline our industry and make it as fast and easy as possible for agents to write a bond, and Federato feels like a true partner that shares that goal. Not only do they want to better understand our business and help us succeed, they want the agents who use our portal to love the product as much as we do. It has changed the way we look at our relationships with other technology providers.” 

- Taylor Rutledge, Chief Growth Officer, Propeller Bonds

The results

In its first month of business, Propeller wrote 12 bonds. Since deploying on Federato, Propeller has scaled rapidly. Today, the company is writing up to 400 per day and is on track to process over 70,000 transactions in 2025. 

Their partner network has expanded from 50 agencies to over 9,000 nationwide. For those agent partners, Propeller has reduced the time it takes them to write a bond by 93%. 

In 2024, Propeller’s largest capacity provider, Arch, made a strategic acquisition of the company.

“We’re extremely proud of the progress we’ve made on our mission so far. It all goes back to the trust we’ve built with both our capacity partners and our agency partners. We wouldn't have that trust if we didn't have a foundation in place that we can rely on to power our growth, keep us moving quickly and make it easy to do business, and Federato provides that foundation.” 

– Chris Kolger, Co-CEO, Propeller Bonds