About Us

Allegiance Financial Group (AFG) is a financial service company that specializes in equipment financing.  We focus on industries we know.  We help our customers meet their financing needs, remarket their equipment, and manage their financial portfolios.

Our founders John Seibel, Pat O'Brien and Mark Spease have more than 40 years of experience in the equipment finance industry.  They came together as a team in 1995 within the Specialty Finance Group.  The Specialty Finance Group (SFG) started in 1990 as part of Cargill Leasing Corporation (CLC) within the financial services division of Cargill, Inc.  CLC had been providing equipment financing since 1974.  Cargill is a world-wide food conglomerate and continues to be one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

In June 1998, Cargill was presented with the opportunity to sell the profitable CLC for a large gain.  Cargill took the opportunity and sold the $2 billion equipment finance company to Firstar Bank, N.A. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  CLC would become Firstar's exclusive equipment finance division.  Over the next three years, Firstar went through several mergers and acquisitions which affected the equipment finance operations.  In the fall of 1998 Firstar merged with Star Bank, N.A. out of Cincinnati, Ohio.  In 1999, the company merged with Mercantile Bank of St. Louis.   And lastly, in 2000, the company merged with U.S. Bancorp out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  This created the fifth largest banking company and the eighth largest equipment finance company in the country.

SFG lived up to its name as specializing in specific industries.  The group focused on equipment financing for the transportation, construction, refuse, and corporate aircraft industries.  Because of its specialized nature, the original group employed in SFG in the Cargill days, would continue through all the mergers and acquisitions.  By the summer of 2001, the SFG portfolio had grown to $1 billion with close to 5,000 customers.  This represented a significant piece of the now $8 billion US Bancorp Leasing and Financial.

Through a strategic planning process, the merger with US Bancorp resulted in corporate headquarters for the equipment finance division to be moved to Portland, Oregon.  Further, the bureaucracy of a $160 billion banking company made it difficult to maintain the flexibility and agility required in the specific industries served by SFG.  As a general equipment lessor, US Bancorp did not have the strategic objective to focus on the needs of these industries.