One day after the launch of a $350B loan program designed to rescue millions of small businesses, technical glitches continued to cripple the ability of the nation’s top lenders to begin processing loans.
However, there's no way in the hastily fashioned system for the banks' computers and those of the Small Business Administration, which administers the Paycheck Protection Program loans, to talk to one another. Bankers have resorted to entering applicant information by hand into E-Tran, the proprietary system used by the SBA to guarantee loans and generate loan numbers.
With banks reporting tens of thousands of applications just in the first day, the system is already overwhelmed. The SBA usually processes about 60,000 loans in an entire year. Despite this, President Donald Trump said in a news briefing Saturday that,"in 24 hours, the SBA processed over 28,000 loans."Senior banking executives at Bank of America and Chase told NBC News they were still waiting on loan numbers to come back from the SBA, and so far had not processed any more than a trickle from the flood of applicants.
Bankers said they were working systems to automate and speed up the process but had no idea when these customers would start to see money in their accounts. An email from the Small Business Administration to lenders Saturday morning apologized for"ongoing technical issues," which included slowness and the inability of"many" lenders to create new logins or reset passwords.Some community banks, locally owned retail banks with less than $1 billion in assets, reported being able to make loans. Connect One Bank of New Jersey told CNBC Friday that they had processed a loan and deposited it into a customer's account.
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