The Last Mile That…Wasn't: Notarization Challenges in Lending and Equipment Finance
Lending got fast. Applications, credit decisions, document generation, and e-signature all compressed into a same-day experience. Then the Power of Attorney needs a notary…and the deal sits.
Let’s talk about what happens when lending and financing workflows go fully digital, including notarization.
Key takeaways
- AP Equipment Financing removed a step that regularly added one to two weeks to the timeline. Sessions now average about 2.5 minutes across 8,000+ notarizations.
- Leasepath hit a 99.15% completion rate in 2025 with 2.3-minute average notary sessions, and enabling it takes credentials rather than an integration project.
- JB&B Capital runs closings in all 50 states with documents returning automatically into Salesforce, cutting a weeks-long process down to days.
- The deployment detail matters as much as the outcome. In every case the win came from putting notarization inside the system the team already used, rather than bolting on another tool.
AP Equipment Financing: one to two weeks, removed
For AP Equipment Financing, notarization was, in Vice President of Operations Melanie Rudiger's words, "one of the few steps that slowed us down." The cost was specific: "Customers did not want to spend time or money tracking down a notary, and it often added one or two weeks to the process."
The company has now completed more than eight thousand notarization transactions, with sessions averaging about 2.5 minutes.
What changed wasn't just the clock. Rudiger described a behavioral shift: "Once customers realized they could notarize the necessary documents online, the hesitation disappeared. It removes a chore they never wanted to deal with, and it saves our team days of waiting."
CMO and CTO Nick Fong framed the bar every IT buyer should hold a vendor to: "Technology is not always convenience, and a lot of tools add steps instead of removing them."
Read the AP Equipment Financing story →
Leasepath: 99.15% completion, and setup measured in credentials
Leasepath gives finance professionals one place to originate, approve, and manage leases. Notarization was the part of the customer journey that stayed offline, and historically it could stretch a lease closing into several days of printing, shipping, in-person signing, and returning.
With Proof, that changed:
- 99.15% completion rate on Leasepath transactions completed with Notarize
- 2.3 minutes average notary session
- 34.7 minutes average for the full notarization process, including identity verification and document execution
As President and GM Jeffrey Bilbrey described: "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."
Plus, the deployment was easy - not another project for their IT team to stress about. Leasepath customers who want to enable notarization obtain credentials from Proof and enter them into Leasepath. No custom integration, no dedicated IT resourcing. Bilbrey called it "as simple as flipping a switch."
JB&B Capital: 50 states, and the documents come back on their own
Every state handles titles differently, and as Lead Title Specialist Abby Church notes, "sometimes every county does too, so our work can get complicated fast."
JB&B integrated remote online notarization directly into Salesforce, where the closing workflow already lived. The team continues to generate documents the same way it always has, sending packages through its existing eSign vendor and triggering Power of Attorney forms through Proof. Both document sets return automatically to Salesforce.
The results: notarized documents completed in minutes, closings supported in all 50 states, and a process that used to take weeks now fully processed in days. Remote notarization sessions average about 3 minutes, across more than 3,100 transactions completed to date.
Director of Operations Beth Plane on the before: "Customers were having trouble getting in front of a notary, and it slowed everything down." And the after: "Customers do not have to go searching for a notary. It is right there on their computer, and everything comes straight back to us through Salesforce."
The common thread
None of these teams were trying to reinvent lending. They had one step that ran on a different clock than everything around it, and closing it returned days to a process the rest of the business had already optimized.
To learn more about the hidden costs within analog steps (and to learn how to close those digital gaps), check out our field report >
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