January 8, 2021

It’s been a busy week in Washington, D.C., but I want to alert you ASAP to some urgent news regarding the opening of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. SBA announced earlier today that the program will open starting Monday, Jan. 11. Please take note that this is a TIERED OPENING – not all banks will be able to begin taking applications then.

What this means:

• Larger banks will most likely NOT be opening up their application process until later in the week;
• On Monday, Jan. 11, only community financial institutions will be able to start taking first-draw PPP loans (these are smaller banks, credit unions, CDFI’s and basically any other lender with less than $1B in assets);
• On Wednesday, these same institutions will be allowed to start taking applications for second-draw PPP loans;
• SBA is planning to post the new application sometime this weekend so borrowers can get an idea of what’s required ahead of the formal application process opening up next week; and
• SBA is telling us that loan number generation will NOT be automatic as before – meaning the process may take a bit longer to protect against fraud, please be patient.

This tiered roll-out is designed to serve those hardest hit first, as dictated by the legislation overseeing this new round of PPP.

We have done our best to stay abreast all changes in the last week, and will continue to provide you resources as soon as we get them.

• On Wednesday, we held a webinar about PPP – you can view that here.
• Yesterday, NSBA posted an initial analysis on the regulations here.
• Today, we posted an update on the roll-out of the program here.

We are continuing to work with our lending experts and will be adding to the regulatory analysis as quickly as we can.

SBA has a great deal of good information on their website as well if you have questions. You can see a list of approved SBA lenders here.