The standard sets the floor. We’ve always built for the ceiling.
It’s been almost a year since the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy (SEEDS) adopted its Standard of Ethical Conduct for Escrow Providers, the first comprehensive standard of its kind in this field. We’ve written before about why that standard matters and what it took to get here. This time, we want to do something different: show, in specific terms, what it actually looks like when a surrogacy escrow provider meets the standard and takes it seriously.
Because a standard is only as good as what it produces in practice. Anyone can say they meet it. The real question is what happens when you ask a provider to show their work.
Much of the media coverage of this industry focuses on what went wrong: the fraud cases, the families who lost everything, the betrayal of trust at the worst possible moment. Those stories are personal to us. We’ve stepped in to help many of those families directly, and we know a number of them individually. What happened to them was terrible, and we hope everyone who profited from hurting them has faced real consequences.
What rarely gets covered is the other half of the story: the questions a family should ask before they hand over their money and what they should look for to know if it’s actually safe. The SEEDS standard is a framework for exactly that. It lays out what should be in place. Here are the questions it points to, and our answers.
Five Categories the Surrogacy Escrow Standard Sets
The SEEDS standard covers five areas: qualifications, governance, oversight, safeguards, and transparency. Below is what each looks like inside SeedTrust and the question we think every family should be asking every provider they’re considering. If a surrogacy or egg donation escrow provider can’t meet or exceed the standard on these five, the risk is too high.
Qualifications. Who is actually managing my surrogacy escrow funds? SeedTrust was built from the ground up by financial professionals, not added on as a side service by an agency or law firm. The people managing client funds day to day include CPAs, attorneys, and MBAs, a level of financial expertise that still isn’t the norm in this industry.
Governance. Can any one person move my money alone? At SeedTrust, no. Every disbursement runs through a five step internal process with documented checks and balances built specifically so that no single individual ever holds unchecked authority over client funds.
Oversight. Who checks that the money is actually there? We undergo independent CPA audits, and the results are made available so families can confirm their funds are held exactly as represented, not simply as promised.
Safeguards. What happens if something goes wrong anyway? The standard requires a $10 million bond. We carry $100 million, ten times the minimum and, to our knowledge, still an industry first.
Transparency. Can I actually see what’s happening with my money, or do I have to take someone’s word for it? Every client and agency partner has real time access to their escrow data and supporting documents through our portal: every transaction, every document, and information on our security, insurance, and audits, all visible as it happens, not reconstructed after the fact. That kind of visibility is what turns a policy into peace of mind.
The Question the Surrogacy Escrow Standard Doesn’t Ask: What’s the Track Record?
A standard sets requirements. It doesn’t tell you what a company has actually done with them over time, and that’s the part families can’t afford to skip. So we’ll add a sixth question of our own: what’s the actual track record?
Ours is public and verifiable. Over the past ten years, SeedTrust has protected surrogacy escrow and egg donation escrow funds for more than 30,000 families. Not one dollar of client funds has ever been lost. Not one cent. And we’ve never had a claim on any of our insurance or bonding.
That last line is the one we’d ask you to sit with. Not “no major incidents.” Not “no incidents to date.” Zero, across ten years and 30,000 families, and never once needing to fall back on the insurance and bonding that exist for exactly this scenario.
What Isn’t in the Standard
The standard doesn’t require pro bono work. We’ve completed more than 1,000 pro bono cases anyway, to help families who had picked the wrong escrow provider: providers that didn’t meet the standard and ultimately failed or stole the money. Many of those families chose those providers simply because they were uninformed: they didn’t know the right questions to ask, or they knew the provider was less secure but wanted to save a few hundred dollars.
That’s the point we keep coming back to: surrogacy escrow may be one of the cheapest services in this market, but getting it wrong can be one of the most painful, in added process and stress, or, worse, one of the most expensive if the money is simply gone.
We raise the pro bono work here not to pad a list of accomplishments, but to make a point about what a standard is and isn’t. It’s a floor, a clear, enforceable minimum that every provider should be able to meet. Not every provider may reach the level of security SeedTrust has built, but every provider should, at a bare minimum, meet the floor. A standard was never meant to describe the best a provider could do, only the least a provider should do. We think that’s exactly the right way to design one: achievable for anyone genuinely committed to acting as a fiduciary, without capping what the most committed providers choose to do beyond it.
Standards Are Only as Good as the Visibility and the Willingness to Ask Questions
We wrote this because a standard without accountability is just a document. Accountability means being willing to ask any surrogacy escrow company the same six questions above in public, with numbers and supporting documents attached, rather than in the abstract. Families, and the professionals helping them build their families, deserve trust and verification.
So consider this an open invitation: ask us anything about the audit process, the bonding structure, or how a specific case moves through our five step disbursement review. We’ll answer in detail, on the record, every time. And whichever provider you’re evaluating for your own journey, ask them the same six questions. If they can’t answer as specifically as we just did, that tells you something too.
Ready to learn more about how SeedTrust can support your journey? Visit our Intended Parents page to explore our services and learn what to look for when choosing an escrow provider. You can also reach our team directly at [email protected].
Acta non verba.
Adam Winder
President & CEO, SeedTrust Escrow
www.SeedTrustEscrow.com
Building Your Family Starts With Trust
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