A solar installer, an HVAC contractor, and a home security company have almost nothing in common on paper.
But ask any of them how a customer pays for equipment over time, and the answer often involves the same structure: a separate financing company handling the loan while the service company handles the installation.
Financing Solar Installations
GoodLeap, a financing platform built specifically for sustainable home upgrades, has provided more than $30 billion in solar and home-efficiency loans since 2018, reaching over 1 million homeowners, according to the company’s own securitization announcements. GoodLeap does not install solar panels, insulation, or HVAC systems. It underwrites the loans that pay for them. Tens of thousands of contractors and manufacturers use GoodLeap’s financing tools without ever touching the lending side of the transaction themselves.
Sustainable home upgrades represent an estimated $450 billion annual market in the United States, by GoodLeap’s own accounting. A market that size needs lending infrastructure built for volume and risk management, not a side function bolted onto a company whose real expertise is installing equipment.
Aurora Solar’s 2024 Solar Industry Snapshot found that 75% of homeowners who are interested in solar but have not yet installed a system cited installation costs as a major concern, and 54% of that group said interest rates specifically felt too high. Only 15% were financing their systems through a leasing program at the time.
Financing HVAC
The same structure shows up in HVAC. Synchrony, a consumer financing company, and Mitsubishi Electric Trane HVAC US LLC renewed a financing partnership in late 2025 that stretches back to 2014. For over a decade, homeowners buying Mitsubishi Electric heating and cooling equipment have financed it through Synchrony rather than through the equipment manufacturer directly.
Synchrony finances products well beyond HVAC, and GoodLeap finances categories well beyond solar. Neither company depends on any single equipment brand’s sales volume, which lets each one build lending infrastructure a single service company could never justify building on its own.
Underwriting Is Its Own Business
Running a credit approval process, pricing risk across thousands of borrowers, and servicing a loan over years takes a different skill set than installing equipment correctly. A financing partner spends years building underwriting models, compliance processes, and loan-servicing systems. A home service company spends its time getting good at HVAC repair, solar installation, or security system setup.
Splitting the two lets each side specialize. The equipment company sets the price and the term at the point of sale, then hands the loan itself to a partner built to manage it. That division shows up almost everywhere equipment financing exists, from solar to HVAC to home security, because the underlying problem, extending credit safely at scale, is the same regardless of what equipment sits at the other end of the loan.
What Stays Separate Even After the Sale
A customer signing up for financed equipment is really entering two agreements at once, even though only one signature happens at the point of sale. The service agreement covers installation and ongoing service. The financing agreement covers the equipment cost, the rate, and the repayment term, and it sits with the financing partner rather than the service company. This split has practical consequences. Changing a service plan does not automatically change what is owed on the equipment. Paying off the equipment early does not require canceling the service agreement.
A customer can usually spot the split by checking the paperwork. Financed equipment typically shows up on a separate statement, from a separate company, with its own customer service line for billing questions. Service and monitoring questions go to the equipment company. Payment and loan questions go to the financing partner. Two different problems get two different phone numbers, and that division rarely changes just because the sale itself felt like one transaction.
Home security is no exception to any of this. Financing running through a dedicated third-party partner rather than through the security company itself is standard practice. The same logic that governs solar and HVAC financing governs it here too. The equipment company sets the terms at sale. The financing partner owns the loan from there.
