The state’s banks, both large and small, played a key role in helping businesses stay afloat in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The banking community delivered an extraordinary effort in the Paycheck Protection Program, helping the U.S. Small Business Administration disburse nearly $497 billion in total loan volume in less than two months, a task bankers once would have thought impossible.
New Hampshire banks – both large and small – played their part, issuing roughly $2.5 billion in total loan volume to more than 23,000 businesses across the state, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The Registry Review, compiled this federal loan data to determine the top PPP lenders in the Granite State.
Large banks with a heavy presence in New Hampshire such as TD Bank and Citizens Bank led the way, issuing 3,395 and 3,013 loans, respectively. But smaller banks in New Hampshire such as the roughly $1.7 billion–asset Bank of New Hampshire pitched in as well, making the top PPP lenders list.
New Playbooks
With such little notice and so many unknowns in the PPP, banks were forced to create their own playbook, leading to a number of different approaches.
Citizens Bank held the No. 1 deposit market share in New Hampshire as of June 30, 2019, the most recent data available, according to the FDIC, and also has a huge presence in many other states. As a result, the bank expected a huge amount of applications and chose to build its own in-house portal for PPP applications.
“With the sheer tens of thousands of applications, there was no doubt we needed an automated, technology-driven platform,” said Joe Carelli, president of Citizens Bank for New Hampshire and Vermont. “This was our biggest effort that we’ve had as an organization to combine so many resources across all of our platforms from retail and business banking, technology, credit markets, commercial banking, that came together.”
Carelli said the portal enabled businesses to quickly apply for PPP loans with minimal human interaction, although bankers were available to provide guidance in certain cases.
Ultimately, the platform was a huge success, with Citizens originating 49,670 PPP loans across its entire footprint for a total volume of more than $5 billion, ranking as the 14th–largest PPP bank lender in the country as of June 30, according to the SBA. Carelli said roughly 75 percent of loans granted went to employers with less than 25 employees.
Each Step Tracked
Bank of New Hampshire, a much smaller operation than the nearly $180 billion–asset Citizens Bank, took a slightly different approach.
The bank did not purchase or build a new piece of software, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t innovate to help their clients get the help they desperately needed as the pandemic sapped foot traffic and overall demand in many industries.
The bank created a whole new workflow to organize and track the massive amount of PPP requests that came in, said Chris Logan, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Bank of New Hampshire.
The workflow had eight or nine steps that allowed loan officers at the bank and other staff track each PPP loan from start to finish. This included from when the initial application was submitted to a credit check to confirming the loan amount to obtaining an e-tran number from the SBA, which tells the bank that money had officially been set aside for that loan.
“By having a workflow, we could see where everyone was in every step along the way,” Logan said. “And then about two weeks into the process, they (the SBA) said you had to fund the [PPP] loans within 10 days of taking the application, so having that system was integral to making sure we marked those dates.”
Bank of New Hampshire certainly pulled its weight, issuing 927 PPP loans for a total volume of roughly $122 million. Logan said roughly 82 percent of the loans were for under $150,000, and the bank only originated 19 loans over $1 million. The median PPP loan amount at Bank of New Hampshire was for $33,000, while the smallest loan went for just $200, he said.
Despite the different paths Citizens and Bank of New Hampshire took on PPP, both Carelli and Logan say participating in the program has been one of the largest overall bank wide efforts each has seen in their careers. Both banks pulled people from other departments to help out and had people working 12-hour days seven days a week at the beginning of PPP.
“Never in my career have I seen a program that was so beneficially impactful to so many businesses, and never before have I been so humbled by the calls, the notes, the letters of businesses that said, ‘if it wasn’t for PPP, my business may not have made it,’” said Carelli. “To be able to be part of an organization that played a part in delivering on PPP to me was the most humbling experience of my career.”
