Minnesota based Sunrise Bank, like most other banks, needed to make some quick decisions about how they would lend Paycheck Protection Program money; the bank called their process Race to E-Tran and as of June 5 the bank lent $216mn of PPP loans; Sunrise looked at 20 different solutions from core banking providers and fintechs; “In working with technology, my general principle is, keep as many options open until you find a path that makes sense,” says Brett Cooksey, Chief Information Officer at Sunrise Bank, to American Banker; for the first round of PPP the bank processed applications manually as they believed there mismatch in solutions and the E-Tran software, they also could not build a custom system fast enough; the bank did start working with low code software provider Anvil, who describe themselves as a paperwork automation platform; “It was very intuitive and descriptive, and that helped us take the data quality that we were getting in the door up several percentage points,” Cooksey said; the team also converted to Microsoft Teams around the same time which threw another wrench into the process; they were able to integrate Anvil into Microsoft tools and the system went live with Sunrise Bank’s lenders conducting due diligence; PPP forced banks of all sizes from all over the country to become intuitive and innovative quickly, thankfully for small businesses banks like Sunrise were up to the task. American Banker
