It’s hard to believe but we’ve just passed the 90-day mark for the first cohort of PPP Forgiveness applications, meaning the Small Business Administration has ramped up their activity in response.
We’ve come a long way since the program was first rolled out and Forgiveness in particular has changed quite substantially.
This is nowhere more evident than in the Forms the SBA provides to borrowers to apply for Forgiveness. Borrowers today have three different options when it comes to application: Form 3508, Form 3508EZ, and, most recently, Form 3508S.
Usually, adding more forms to a process makes it more complicated. But in this case, the SBA has worked to simplify the Forgiveness Process with each form they’ve introduced. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to Forgiveness, the three forms are tailored to meet the borrower’s and lender’s needs based on the size of the PPP loan. The largest PPP loans, therefore, typically are required to use the standard Form 3508, while the smallest loans are eligible to use Form 3508S.
Likewise, borrowers with smaller loans that qualify for Form 3508S have less documentation to provide and a less complex review process to go through on the lender side.
By simplifying the process for smaller loans, the SBA hoped to expedite the Forgiveness process for Small Businesses and the lenders they got their PPP loans from. With more than 250,000 PPP loans on the Numerated Platform, our data shows just how much time borrowers and lenders can save, on average, using Form 3508S compared to its longer counterparts.
According to our data, it takes, on average, about two days for a borrower to go from starting Form 3508S on the Numerated platform to submitting it to their lender for review, including the necessary documentation. The same process takes a borrower about five days to complete for the Standard Form 3508, by comparison, while Form 3508EZ takes about three days.
On the lender’s side of the equation, it takes, on average, nearly seven days to review the application and documentation submitted by the lender and to submit it to the SBA, using the Numerated Platform. For the Standard Form 3508, this same process takes almost three full weeks to complete—or 20 days to be precise. By comparison, Form 3508EZ took lenders roughly 18 days, on average, to complete.
This data largely proves the SBA was able to accomplish the goal they set out to, and it’s helped to dramatically improve the experience for borrowers and lenders.
The data above also provides an important snapshot into the current state of PPP Forgiveness, which remains an ever-changing process.
It’s difficult for lenders to keep a pulse on Forgiveness without access to the data we have available in the Numerated Platform.
To help share these insights more widely, we’re including regular PPP Forgiveness benchmarking data updates during our Weekly Tuesday Q&A sessions.
Get more info on upcoming insights sessions and save your seat here.
