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Will Tumulty

Executive

EIDL
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
EIDL
Updated

The profile

CEO of Rapid Finance, the Bethesda small-business lender whose software scored COVID-EIDL applications for SBA "in less than a second." Rapid was paid about $148 million as a second-tier subcontractor under RER Solutions and Rocket Loans. The contract drew an Inspector General evaluation and a House inquiry, and no charge.

In the archive

Identity and role

Will Tumulty is the chief executive of Rapid Financial Services, LLC, which did business as RapidAdvance and now operates as Rapid Finance. He has led it since 2015. Rockbridge Growth Equity, the Detroit private-equity firm Dan Gilbert co-founded, bought RapidAdvance in September 2013. That puts Rapid in Gilbert's "Rock family of companies" beside Rocket Loans.

Career

The 2015 RapidAdvance release announcing his appointment says he began 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. Before Rapid 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.

Pandemic-relief role

Rapid lent none of its own money under a federal program. It sold SBA a decision.

In December 2018 SBA awarded its disaster loan-recommendation contract to RER Solutions, a Herndon, Virginia small business run by Errin Green, with Rocket Loans as subcontractor. Rocket in turn subcontracted to Rapid. When COVID-EIDL applications arrived at 680,000 in a single day in March 2020, SBA's own portal could not take the volume. The House Select Subcommittee's June 2022 staff report says SBA, RER, Rocket and Rapid built a system that sent application data to Rapid and returned recommendations to SBA. Rapid's system "reviewed COVID-19 EIDL application information in less than a second to provide fraud alerts, credit checks, and approval or denial recommendations." SBA agreed to pay RER more than $40 for each application reviewed. SBA's Inspector General, in Report 22-10, recorded that under the second task order SBA relied on the Rapid Finance Portal.

The staff report divides the $738 million SBA had paid through February 2021: RER $357 million, Rocket Loans $233 million and Rapid $148 million, or 20 percent. Rapid had 163 employees and contractors on the work and paid $39 million of its share to third-party data providers. Rocket identified 20 employees. RER said it assigned six.

The same report says SBA had Rapid build a batch-approval function in which SBA reviewers could not open individual files inside a batch. By the Subcommittee's count, as many as 1.6 million of the 3.9 million approved applications, 41 percent, "may have been approved with no actual review by an SBA employee." Approval stayed SBA's legal responsibility.

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, asking for documents about the EIDL contract. The letter noted that Rocket and Rapid were expected to receive more than $360 million combined. Letters went the same day to RER and Rocket Loans. By June 2022 the Subcommittee had 17,000 pages from SBA and the three companies and had held two briefings with RER and Rapid.

How the contract ended

USAspending.gov records $926.1 million paid across seven task orders under the RER contract, which ended March 17, 2024. The Inspector General questioned $13,046,124.50 paid to the subcontractor tier above the 50 percent limit on subcontracting, and addressed all six of its recommendations to SBA. Its semiannual report for the six months to September 30, 2023 no longer listed Report 22-10 among reports with open recommendations. The staff report quotes Rocket's parent on its 2021 results: revenue fell "mainly as a result of a reduction in revenues earned from processing economic injury disaster loans."

Their own relief

We found no PPP or EIDL loan to Rapid Financial Services or to Will Tumulty in SBA borrower data.

Will Tumulty has not been charged with a crime. We found no enforcement action or federal docket naming Rapid Financial Services in a pandemic-program matter. The Inspector General's findings and the Subcommittee's are directed at SBA's contracting and review, and carry no penalty for Rapid.

Since 2025

Tumulty remains CEO of Rapid Finance, which sells lending software to banks alongside its own small-business loans. A June 17, 2025 release from Bethesda introduced an AI document module that, by the company's account, cuts loan-application processing "from approximately 20 minutes to 20 seconds." It quoted Tumulty as CEO.

Documents on this site

Original source documents and archived copies

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).
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