On the heels of reaching profitability, Lease End launched its newest tool to help consumers avoid what experts call “dark patterns.”

Lease End highlighted that Payoff Intelligence is an artificial intelligence agent designed to overcome one of the most persistent hurdles in the auto industry: getting a lease payoff amount.

Lease End claimed that sometimes finding a lease buyout number — the exact price to purchase the vehicle — can be made intentionally difficult to get. The fintech company said lease providers often utilize systems designed to frictionally retain customers or delay cancellations. These practices, often referred to as “dark patterns,” rely on consumer fatigue.

Lease End asserted in a news release that the scale of the problem is significant.

According to a 2024 review by the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN), Lease End noted 76% of online services employ at least one dark pattern to manipulate user behavior.

Additionally, Lease End also cited the Harvard Business Review, which reported Americans spend an average of 13 hours per year in calling queues.

For the 2 million Americans exiting auto leases each year, Lease End computed that’s tens of millions of hours wasted.

“These systems are often framed as efficiency measures, but in reality, too many are engineered to take advantage of consumer fatigue,” Lease End co-founder and CRO Zander Cook said. “The longer a customer waits and the more hoops they jump through, the more likely they are to give up. That’s why we built Payoff Intelligence. It is part of our laser focus on creating great experiences for drivers. We want to remove the friction entirely so they can make the best financial decision for themselves without the headache.”

Lease End explained Payoff Intelligence can guarantee an accurate payoff amount without a single touch from the user.

The company said it is not a passive tool; it is an active agent that logs into portals, navigates automated phone systems, and even speaks on the phone with human support representatives to get the job done.

Other key capabilities include:

—Comprehensive navigation: Handles everything from web portals to live text and voice chats.

—Voice negotiation: Capable of traversing complex phone trees to reach live agents and conversing with them directly.

—Automated Escalation: Detects delays and pushes through stalling tactics to ensure the number is secured.

Lease End asserted that this capability could save lessees hours of active work spread over several weeks, compressing a frustrating manual process into a background task that can be resolved automatically.

“Building Payoff Intelligence required us to map the vast, unstructured web of support channels across the entire auto finance industry,” Lease End CTO Dave Williams said. “We had to train the model not just to understand language, but to understand bureaucratic persistence — to know when a bot is stalling, when a portal is hiding information, and how to push through to a resolution.

“It’s not just about automation, it’s about giving the driver a tool that works as hard as they would, without them having to lift a finger,” Williams added.

Fueled by record-breaking results for 2025, which included revenue growing by 60% year-over-year and 1,559% since 2021, Lease End co-founder and CEO Brandon Williams said the company now has the first tool in the world designed to navigate the dozens of fragmented support channels set up by lease providers — including chatbots, email chains, complex online portals, automated phone trees, and even human support representatives — to secure the essential data drivers need to move forward.

“Payoff Intelligence cuts through the roadblocks leasing companies put in place to make it difficult to get a payoff,” Williams said. “It gets payoff information for drivers so they don’t have to jump through all the hurdles and return to a dealership at the end of their lease.”