Before opening LeaseQ, I had just finished a successful turn-around project for a large consumer auto insurance marketplace, loved the marketplace business model and wanted to do it again. When I was introduced to equipment financing, I realized that I had discovered a dinosaur in the backyard — here was this huge industry called equipment financing, generating over $900 billion in loans and leases per year with incredibly manual processes.
I studied the industry, talked to several businesses, equipment sellers and lenders, and ultimately learned three things: The financing process can be very painful for borrowers; it's seldom done online — meaning that for this business to work, it would also need to be available in the equipment dealership, much like consumer auto financing; and very few finance companies have automated underwriting, so to provide instant quotes, we would have to have an automated underwriting engine able to capture the underwriting rules with the help of the lenders. I was lucky to find a CTO who had built three underwriting engines, and after a year, we had ourselves a platform.