Business owners across the country have soaked up approximately $90 billion from the federal Paycheck Protection Program since the second wave of funding became available Monday morning, which means about $230 billion remains in the fund for now.
However, the second round of funding did not go off without a hitch. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s E-TRAN system, where lenders submit a borrower’s PPP application, bottlenecked as it did at the beginning of the first wave of PPP funding.
Port Washington State Bank among other lenders chose to access the system after business hours, even as late as 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning to avoid the immense traffic on the website, said James Schowalter, PWSB president and chief operating officer.
To give a sense of how much pent-up demand there was following PPP round one, PWSB had 70 “pending” applications for approximately $4.3 million. A team of 5 was delegated to processing PPP loans and on occasion, particularly on day one, experienced intermittent system issues.
Hundreds of additional lenders became eligible to process PPP loans during the second round, which contributed to E-TRAN issues, said Robert Scott Regional Administrator with the U.S. SBA. As of Wednesday evening, 960,000 loans had been approved through 5,300 lenders.
“We had some issues, more growing pains that certainly we needed to adjust for and scale up to,” Scott said. “The system now has been running well and we haven’t had as many lender complaints about getting into our system.”
Although experts had anticipated the PPP funds to run dry in two days, Scott said it’s possible the fund could be depleted by Friday.
Of the $320 billion in additional PPP funding, $60 billion was set aside to target community-based and small lenders – half the funds were allocated to lenders with $10 billion or less in assets and the rest was set aside for lenders with between $10 billion and $50 billion in assets.
As of Wednesday, 587,000 (61%) of PPP loans approved were small lenders with fewer than $10 billion in assets. When including medium lenders (those with assets between $10 billion and $50 billion), 82% of approved PPP loans – 793,000 of 960,000 loans – have been made by small and medium lenders.
In dollars, more than $43 billion in approved PPP loans were from small lenders and a total of approximately $63 billion in approved PPP loans were from small and medium lenders. Small and medium lenders have processed approximately 70 percent of the total loan dollar amount, according to an U.S. SBA press release.
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