Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Will Tumulty

Profiles · Principals

ProfilePerson

Will Tumulty

Executive

EIDL
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
EIDL
Updated

The profile

CEO of Rapid Finance (Rapid Financial Services), owned by Rockbridge Growth Equity; Rapid built the automated decisioning system used for SBA's COVID-EIDL program as a subcontractor to RER Solutions.

Identity and role

Will Tumulty is the Chief Executive Officer of Rapid Financial Services, LLC, the Bethesda, Maryland small-business lender that did business as RapidAdvance and now operates as Rapid Finance. He has led the company since 2015. Rapid is part of Dan Gilbert's Rock family of companies, owned since 2013 by Detroit-based Rockbridge Growth Equity.

Biography

Per the 2015 RapidAdvance release announcing his appointment, he began his career in the U.S. Navy, completing SEAL training and serving five years on active duty, and holds a bachelor's in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and graduate degrees from Stanford, including an MBA.

In financial services he worked in prepaid debit cards, as CEO of Ready Financial Group and COO of AccountNow, with earlier roles at Green Dot and Capital One (2015 release). He joined RapidAdvance as CEO in 2015 and the company's leadership page still lists him as CEO.

The company and its EIDL role

Rapid's pandemic role was not lending its own money under a federal program.

RapidAdvance was already a subcontractor in SBA's disaster-lending stack as a Rocket affiliate, under the loan-recommendation contract held by Errin Green's RER Solutions and Rocket Loans. When COVID-EIDL applications surged in March 2020, SBA's existing portal and Rocket's pre-pandemic system could not handle the volume or the type of applications. According to the House Select Subcommittee's June 2022 report, SBA worked with RER, Rocket, and Rapid in 2020 to create a new system that sent application data to Rapid and returned recommendations to SBA; Rapid's system ran fraud alerts and credit checks and generated approval, manual-review, or denial recommendations.1

The committee's release says Rapid employed 163 employees and contractors on the contract and supplied proprietary software, and received $148 million (20 percent of the contract's proceeds) while Rocket, a Rapid affiliate, received $233 million for 20 employees.1 SBA's Inspector General (Report 22-10) separately documented SBA's reliance on Rapid's portal to process COVID-EIDL applications.2

On February 11, 2021, Chairman James Clyburn of the Select Subcommittee and Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez of the House Small Business Committee wrote to Tumulty by name, demanding documents about the EIDL contract and noting that Rocket and Rapid were expected to receive more than $360 million combined in taxpayer funds.3 The letter followed an earlier 2020 inquiry into the RER contract. No public response by Rapid appears in the sources we have.

The Subcommittee found that SBA directed Rapid to create a batch-approval function under which SBA reviewers could not open individual application files inside a batch; as a result, as many as 1.6 million (41 percent of the 3.9 million applications ultimately approved) may have been approved with no actual review by an SBA employee (committee release).1 The batch sizes and the instruction to include applications carrying fraud indicators are described in the full report. The legal responsibility for approving loans stayed with SBA.

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL self-loan to Rapid Financial Services or to Will Tumulty has been identified in SBA borrower data.

No criminal charge, civil fraud case, or enforcement action has been identified against Rapid Financial Services or Will Tumulty in connection with the EIDL contract. We located no federal docket naming Rapid Financial Services in a pandemic-program matter. The congressional document demand and the Subcommittee's findings are oversight, not an accusation of crime against the company or its CEO.

The Inspector General and the Subcommittee found that SBA expanded a loan-recommendation contract into a national emergency-lending engine without fresh competition and routed Rapid's fraud signals into a batch process built for throughput.21

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Tumulty remains CEO of Rapid Finance (the rebranded RapidAdvance), still based in Bethesda and still part of the Rock family of companies under Rockbridge Growth Equity ownership. The firm continues as a small-business lender and lending-technology provider.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

Notes

  1. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Idle on EIDL Fraud (June 14, 2022). ↩
  2. SBA Office of Inspector General, Report 22-10 (Apr. 14, 2022). ↩
  3. Clyburn and Velázquez letter to Will Tumulty, CEO, Rapid Finance (Feb. 11, 2021). ↩
Back to top