As the PPP federal loan program ran out on last Thursday, there has been a hope of additional funding to further help the small businesses receive the much-needed capital infusion. Positive news is the second wave of distribution is in the pipeline and there is a lot of progress as on Sunday the 19th per the relief funding news. There has been also an interim final rule on April 14th by the SBA, to facilitate participation in PPP by self-employed individuals, eligibility of businesses that receive revenue from legal gaming and many more – as mentioned in this policy guidance by SBA. Also there is a talk about money for hospitals, testing firms along with small businesses (refer this).
This only means more applications being expected from businesses that were not covered in the first wave. Obviously for many small and mid-sized banks and credit unions this is a huge opportunity to capture the market. The Big Banks will understandably address their existing bigger clients and so for many smaller, local companies, access to this capital is via smaller community banks and credit unions.
The conundrum here is regardless of the size of the client, the process remains the same i.e. a larger client who wants $5 Mil vs a smaller client who wants $100 K, the application to be followed and the qualification criteria applied remains the same. This means the bank’s efficiencies in processing applications is key and the faster they could process and get it to SBA for approvals the quicker they can improve the clientele.
As mentioned in my previous articles (this & this), RPA enables many steps in on-boarding process and also helps in taking on new clients and related documentation quickly. The most time-consuming efforts for many community banks are the things related to manual data entry of new borrower clients and re-keying information into the loan origination system along with documents verification. How much ever sophisticated the current systems are, when there is any kind of document collection exercise it would mean efforts for data entry and verification and that is where RPA as a lever can help.
It is still not too late to Automate. From front-end web form to back end data scraping BOT to entering data into E-Tran BOT to conducting eligibility verification BOT, Sage IT can identify the potential automatable areas in your current setup and quickly suggest solutioning to meet the next wave of demand.
Leveraging a Partner like Sage IT, enables your community bank to fight this situation with automation and provide additional support needed. Moreover, these BOTs can be achieved in just 48-72 hours and Sage IT provides free discovery sessions and the support needed for executing these BOTs across leading RPA platforms. For more information and any assistance, please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected].
POST WRITTEN BY
Gopi Krishna V Akella
Vice President – Sales & Business Development at Sage IT Inc.
