Surety Week - Event report

ICISA Surety Week - event report

By Raluca Ezaru

The first edition of ICISA “Surety Week” was successfully concluded on 25 February after a week packed with events. With this new initiative, ICISA aimed to organize “A worldwide celebration and exploration of the Surety sector”.

This was an effort to highlight the phenomenal work of our members and the incredible professionals in our industry to a wider audience. Being able to reflect on Surety Week at this stage, we can say it was a great success. And more than that, something to build upon and repeat the success of again!

The thinking behind this campaign was primarily to create a new opportunity for dialogue within the surety sector, but also to throw open the doors to the outside world. They surety industry punches above its weight economically and we wanted to highlight the positive role it plays and can continue to play into the future.

Throughout the week we heard from experts from sureties who shared their thoughts on challenges and new developments in the sector. But we also extended our invitation to regulators, banks, servicers, as well as users of bonds who could discuss their perspective on our industry or the issues affecting it. Our speakers shared their views on topics as diverse as sustainability and technology, as well as many other important topics facing the industry today. We were pleased to see a genuine “buzz” created around Surety Week, as well as opening of new conversations within our community and the wider audience attending the sessions. Throughout the week, we had almost we welcomed almost 2000 attendees across our 8 virtual sessions! These attendees were drawn from sureties themselves, but also huge numbers from brokers, servicers, banks, regulators and users of Surety products.

The conclusion of the first ever ICISA Surety Week highlighted that there is real interest in the Surety sector, and the availability for a transparent dialogue between parties involved in Surety business. But the challenge is now created to keep this dialogue going.

One of ICISA’s role is to support spreading knowledge and best practices on the Credit Insurance and Surety sectors. Surety Week fulfilled this goal and we look forward to hosting it again next year. Equally we look forward to building on this success further with Credit Insurance week later in 2022. We hope you can join us too!

ICISA Surety Week briefly...

• 8 online sessions organized in 4 days; • over 800 people registered for the events; • 26 specialists spoke during the sessions; • 213 individual companies registered (44 sureties, 169 non-surety); • over 1800 attendees.