MISSION
Innovation Finance® is building
the best, most trusted business equipment financing platform in the world.
Twenty-five years ago, first year Cornell Law School student Bill Verhelle, along with business partner Guy Klinger, founded First American Commercial Bancorp, Inc. (d/b/a First American Equipment Finance). They had a vision to establish a new, centralized, CRM-controlled commercial lending distribution model, before most business leaders were thinking about CRM technology. Over the course of two decades, the new business model succeeded wildly1 , and they became experts at running a national commercial lending business, serving the interests of some of the largest and most sophisticated business borrowers in America.
The company they established in the late 1990’s, First American Equipment Finance, became one of the largest commercial equipment finance businesses in the U.S.1 They sold First American Equipment Finance2, and three years later, in 2015, Bill departed as CEO to contemplate an entirely new embedded finance business model for the equipment finance industry. Innovation Finance USA LLC, the creator of QuickFi® was founded in 2018. Several top officers from First American (including its Chief Credit Officer and its Chief Technology Officer) co-founded the new company.
1Until the emergence of QuickFi’s embedded finance solution, most technology investments in banks and equipment finance companies involved sales-enablement and CRM enhancements, pursuing the prior business model Verhelle and Klingler introduced in the late 1990’s.
2Today, First American Equipment Finance is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada.
CEO, FOUNDER
Industry trends, and market research from firms such as Accenture, Bain & Company, and McKinsey and Company suggested a groundbreaking proposition: the more efficient, centralized sales model previously pioneered by Verhelle and Klingler will be disrupted by embedded finance within the coming decade.3
The embedded finance revolution began with payment processing at the point-of-sale with companies like PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay. More recently, embedded finance gained prominence in unsecured, consumer lending with firms like Klarna, Affirm, AfterPay and others.
Since the marketplace launch of QuickFi in 2021, QuickFi has been refining an end-to-end, 100% digital embedded finance solution for the $1 trillion4 per year B-to-B secured equipment finance marketplace. QuickFi partners with banks and global OEMs to provide SMB borrowers with direct access to instant business equipment financing at the point of sale.
The transition from traditional sales business models to digital borrower self-service business models is well underway in adjacent industries; however, business equipment financing still operates almost entirely on a traditional sales delivery model.
The embedded finance model improves the customer experience and unlocks massive cost savings and repeat business potential for banks and OEMs. QuickFi offers banks and OEMs an option to jump from where they are today, to a 100% mobile, digital, borrower self-service delivery model capturing massive cost and staff time savings.
Because QuickFi is an end-to-end white-labeled solution, there are no complex systems integrations. QuickFi can be operational for a new bank or captive manufacturer business partner in less than 30 days. Because QuickFi requires no up front cost and no long-term commitment, the decision to implement QuickFi is risk-free.
For twenty years, commercial lending has bolted software systems of record onto a hundred-year-old distribution model and called it innovation. Core banking systems. Lease accounting platforms. CRMs. They are designed to store, track, and reconcile what has already happened. The next generation of financial infrastructure is not about record keeping. It’s about execution.
We are now entering the era of AI-powered systems of action, directly serving borrowers by bringing them online—from initial credit application through final loan or lease payment. A system of action doesn’t wait for employees to:
- re-key data,
- switch between platforms,
- interpret policies, or
- initiate downstream workflows.
Instead, it acts in real time—at the moment of intent—across origination, credit, documentation, funding, and ongoing loan servicing. Embedded lending enables small and medium-sized business borrowers to self-serve financing transactions end-to-end. Loan and lease workflows are no longer processed by bank employees on behalf of borrowers. Borrowers initiate, complete, and manage transactions directly—instantly, 24/7/365. These distinctions matter enormously in commercial lending.
In the $1.34 trillion U.S. business equipment finance market, lending still occurs after a sales process concludes—through disconnected systems, manual handoffs, and delayed decisions. That architecture was tolerable when speed and cost didn’t matter. Today, transactions are processed by bank employees interacting with internal systems, while communicating with borrowers through calls and emails—tracked in Salesforce and other systems of record. This internal busy-work disappears when lending is embedded and borrower-driven. Traditional workflows are a structural constraint. This transition cannot be incremental. It requires abandoning employee-centric workflows entirely.
Embedded lending places financing inside the transaction itself, rather than downstream from it. AI enhances this model by enabling decisions and workflows to occur at the point of action, rather than after employee review. Together, embedded lending and AI fundamentally transform how business lending is done. This isn’t about replacing systems of record. Many will persist for some time. But value creation is shifting upstream—to systems that:
- put borrowers online end-to-end,
- initiate decisions,
- orchestrate workflows,
- interact directly with customers, and
- and trigger systems of record, rather than the reverse.
This shift is already visible across global software markets. Having built lending platforms in both eras, we’ve seen firsthand why this transition is inevitable. At QuickFi, we believe embedded lending—enhanced by AI—will define the next operating model for the $1.34 trillion U.S. equipment finance industry.
QuickFi’s build a new, embedded finance lending platform to better serve creditworthy corporate borrowers using the latest technology. QuickFi® was designed to dramatically improve the small and medium business (SMB) borrower experience. QuickFi incorporates artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, facial recognition, as well as other emerging mobile, cloud, and data technologies to empower an entirely new, nearly instant borrower, self-service experience at the point of sale.
QuickFi will revolutionize your lending business in less than 30 days. Contact the QuickFi team at (585) 207-0100 or email our CEO at bill@QuickFi.com with questions or a 30-minute virtual meeting request.
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