Finch and Codat are partnering up to help lenders better serve SMBs for PPP loans

Finch and Codat are partnering to empower financial institutions to supply the funds SMBs need to weather economic challenges, starting with PPP loans.

What is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)?

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) represented an unprecedented action by Congress to help SMBs that experienced major business disruption in the wake of the global pandemic. Over 5.2 million loans were approved by 5,460 lenders totaling $525B as of August 2020.

In January 2021 the second wave of PPP loans was made available totaling $284B in order to provide additional emergency financial support to SMBs.

There was a range of problems experienced by the first round of PPP loans. Lack of clarity on the correct forms that needed to be completed, large corporates being provided with loans whilst the small businesses were left hanging; and a complete lack of understanding into how forgiveness worked.

This time around businesses and lenders are better equipped to receive and offer funding through the program, but it’s still not an easy process.

So what is the process?

The number of steps and the depth of information required from various systems to facilitate a successful PPP loan can be overwhelming.

SMBs have to fulfill a range of eligibility requirements. They must dig up key business data, calculate estimated loan amounts using average payroll costs, and then go through a separate process to apply for forgiveness that includes cost summaries for qualified expenses.

Lenders have to conduct good-faith reviews for loan amounts, disburse funds quickly, and confirm the qualified expenses by asking for proof.

A partnership that streamlines PPP application all via a single API

While submitting an application, businesses are required to provide:

• Proof they have suffered a decrease in revenue
• A detailed breakdown of the business’s expenses along with the receipts attached to those expenses
• Granular employee-specific information as well as aggregate wage amount

This can take small business owners hours, if not days to produce manually.

Many of these data points can be made accessible through Finch and Codat’s platforms to help SMBs and lenders make the most out of this program, seamlessly & securely allowing these businesses to share their payroll and accounting data with lenders.

Using Finch, lenders can retrieve key payroll information directly from the business’s payroll system for specified periods, employee-level data to calculate the maximum loan eligibility and auto-populate key business data required in the PPP loan application.

Lenders can use Codat to obtain access to accounting data, including existing debt & expenses as well as revenue, to build a comprehensive view of the SMB’s financial situation. Codat also allows lenders to extract key evidence to support the expense claims (i.e. receipts).

Once the capital is disbursed, lenders servicing the loans can utilize the same ongoing connections to confirm how the funds were spent, using Finch to confirm payroll spend and Codat to verify other qualified business expenses. All without businesses having to re-authorize the connection to their financial software.

Using both platforms lenders can cut down application time and reduce errors that could arise from manual calculations.

Finch and Codat combined can help lenders make a faster impact on SMBs with access to PPP loans.

For more information on how Finch and Codat can help you please reach out to the Finch team at founders@tryfinch.com or Codat directly at info@codat.io.