BOCA RATON, Fla., Oct. 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Aquilini Investment Group, the Vancouver family enterprise behind the Vancouver Canucks and Rogers Arena, has entered payments for the first time through a strategic partnership with ZeFund LLC, the company behind the QuickRefund™ platform. The partnership is anchored by an equity investment from Aquilini Brands USA Inc. and is the first outside capital QuickRefund has accepted since its founding in 2025. Terms were not disclosed.
A family that sees it early The Aquilini Investment Group is led by three generations of the Aquilini family and operates 28 different lines of business, from professional sports and real estate to hotels and restaurants. The family has a long record of moving into industries before they were obvious, including renewable energy, aquaculture and technology. Payments infrastructure is the newest of those bets.
“We look at a lot of companies, and most of them are trying to be a better version of something that already exists,” said Dax Aquilini, Vice President of Investments at Aquilini. “This one is different. It is a layer of the payments system nobody has built, in front of a problem that gets worse every quarter.”
“What convinced us was the team,” Aquilini continued. “Jeff and Allen did not come at this from the outside. They built QuickRefund to protect portfolios they were responsible for, and it worked. We back people who have already proven the thing works on their own business.”
Built from inside high-risk payments QuickRefund CEO Jeff Foster and Chief Revenue Officer Allen Beyer have spent many years in high-risk payments, managing merchant portfolios where a single bad month of disputes can cost a merchant its processing. They built QuickRefund first to protect their own book of business, then opened it to the ISOs, acquirers and processors facing the same problem.
QuickRefund sits between a cleared transaction and a filed dispute. When a customer wants a refund or wants to cancel a subscription, QuickRefund gives them a fast, merchant-branded way to ask for it. Each request is checked in real time against rules the merchant sets, and approved refunds go straight back to the customer’s card. Because the customer gets an answer before they ever call their bank, no fraud report or dispute record is created, and the transaction never counts against the merchant with the card networks. Setup takes about five minutes, requires no code and stores no cardholder data.
The timing is set by the card networks. On April 1, Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) cut the merchant threshold to a 1.5 percent combined fraud and dispute ratio, down from 2.2 percent.
“Every fraud tool lives in front of the authorization, and every chargeback tool lives behind the filing,” said Jeff Foster, CEO of QuickRefund. “We built for the window in between. With Aquilini as a partner, not just an investor, we can move faster for the merchants and acquirers dealing with this right now.”
Use of proceeds The investment will be used to hire across sales, client services and engineering, and to build out the partner onboarding, reporting and enterprise infrastructure needed to support QuickRefund’s channel base. The company distributes through ISOs, acquirers, processors and commerce platforms and is live with 30+ distribution channels, including Maverick Payments, Paymerica, Ainsworth Payments, sticky.io and ExpiTrans.
“More and more of the conversations I’m having with ISOs, acquirers and merchants involve dispute ratios and the impact they can have on a merchant account,” said Allen Beyer, Chief Revenue Officer of QuickRefund. “We know that conversation because we’ve been on their side of the table. This partnership lets us put more people in front of those partners, help protect their merchant portfolios and get them live faster.”
About The Aquilini Investment Group The Aquilini Investment Group is a privately held, family-owned enterprise founded in Vancouver, British Columbia by Luigi Aquilini and led today by three generations of the Aquilini family. Its 28 different lines of business include the Vancouver Canucks and Rogers Arena, residential and commercial development, hotels and restaurants, renewable energy, agriculture and aquaculture, and technology investments. Learn more at aquilini.com.
About QuickRefund QuickRefund™ is a post-transaction resolution platform operated by ZeFund LLC of Boca Raton, Florida. QuickRefund occupies the layer between authorization and dispute, giving consumers a fast, branded way to get a refund or cancel a subscription and giving merchants and their acquirers a way to keep those transactions out of the card networks entirely. The company was founded in 2025 by Jeff Foster. Learn more at GetQuickRefund.com. Follow QuickRefund on LinkedIn.
