How Equipment Finance Companies Close Loans Remotely
In equipment finance, the deal can be done and the money still cannot move until one document comes back. The power of attorney authorizes lien releases, title transfers, and asset delivery, it has to be notarized, and in a manual process that means mailing paper to a customer and waiting.
Melanie Rudiger, VP of Operations at AP Equipment Financing, describes what that wait costs: "Notarization was one of the few steps that slowed us down. Customers did not want to spend time or money tracking down a notary, and it often added one or two weeks to the process. We needed something that kept deals moving."
One or two weeks, on a deal that was already approved.
Remote online notarization removes that wait. The lessee completes the notarized POA from their phone in a live audio-video session with a commissioned notary, with their identity established digitally before they ever reach the notary. Three lenders have rebuilt the step that way, and each ran into a different part of the problem, which is why their experiences are worth reading together.
AP Equipment Financing: the one analog step in a digital process
AP serves businesses that need equipment quickly and cannot absorb administrative delay. Notarization had become the single moment where customers were pushed out of a fast digital experience into a slow offline one.
The company has now completed more than 8,000 notarizations, with sessions averaging about 2.5 minutes and notaries available 24/7/365.
The interesting part is what happened to customer resistance. It disappeared, and the team puts that down to taking a chore away. As Rudiger's colleague put it, once customers realized they could notarize online, the hesitation went away, because it takes away something nobody wanted to do and saves the internal team days of waiting.
CMO and CTO Nick Fong drew the distinction that makes this stick: "Technology is not always convenience, and a lot of tools add steps instead of removing them. Proof is different."
Leasepath: what a completion rate does to a sales conversation
Leasepath, built cloud-first on Microsoft Dynamics, gives finance professionals one place to originate, approve, and manage leases. The missing piece was the last mile, so it embedded our Notarize product directly into the platform.
The numbers: a 99.15% completion rate in 2025, notary sessions averaging 2.3 minutes, full end-to-end completion averaging 34.7 minutes including identity verification, and more than 6,000 notarized transactions since January 2022.
President and GM Jeffrey Bilbrey treats that completion rate as a commercial asset: "When you can tell a customer that their deal will be signed, sealed, and delivered in under an hour with a 99 percent success rate, it changes the relationship. Instead of worrying about delays, our clients are free to focus on service and growth."
He also noted how little lift adoption required: "Turning on Notarize inside Leasepath is as simple as flipping a switch." Customers get credentials from us and enter them into Leasepath, with no custom integration and no IT resourcing.
JB&B Capital: fifty states, each with its own rules
JB&B built its reputation on fast decisions and a short path to funding. Expanding nationwide made the final step the one that no longer matched the speed of everything else. Director of Operations Beth Plane on the constraint: "Customers were having trouble getting in front of a notary, and it slowed everything down."
Lead Title Specialist Abby Church describes the underlying difficulty, which will be familiar to anyone doing multi-state title work: "Every state handles titles differently, and sometimes every county does too, so our work can get complicated fast. Proof gives us something we can count on. It keeps the documents moving, even when everything around the process feels unpredictable."
JB&B integrated our remote online notarization into Salesforce, where the closing workflow already lived, triggering POA forms through us so completed documents return automatically. Documents are accepted in all 50 states, including the company's first transactions in Hawaii and Alaska. Notary sessions average about three minutes, across more than 3,100 transactions.
The TL;DR: The benefits of closing remotely
When looking across these customer stories, you see the clear benefits to closing online:
You fund faster, so you can fund more.
AP took one to two weeks out of its timeline. Leasepath gets from invitation to completed notarization in an average of 34.7 minutes, with the notary session itself running 2.3 minutes. When the wait was measured in weeks, turnaround was a hard ceiling on how much business a team could put through. Lift the ceiling and the same people close more deals.
Deals stop dying in the last mile.
Leasepath's 99.15% completion rate means the paperwork has almost stopped being the reason an approved deal falls over. Every percentage point there is revenue you already earned and were at risk of losing to a form.
Your map stops shrinking your market.
JB&B has documents accepted in all 50 states, including its first transactions in Hawaii and Alaska. A lender whose process only works smoothly in a handful of states is quietly declining business it already won.
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