The government did not have a good mechanism for extending $670bn in small business loans and the SBA’s E-Tran came with its fair share of issues; the system was designed to lend about $20bn a year from less than 1,800 banks; PPP was like nothing seen before and the SBA was also home to one of the smallest budgets in the government; banks on the other hand have been spending billions a year to update their technology, this led to a mismatch in tech as the program ramped up; “To do this as quickly as possible, there was no other game in town,” said Charles Potts, Chief Innovation Officer at the Independent Community Bankers of America, to Business Insider. “There is no other platform or mechanism by which a lender could be the intermediary to money from the federal government and distribute it to small businesses,” he added.; banks started to build their own systems to interact better with E-Tran but that overloaded the system and gave an edge to the big banks; all things considered the system was able to extend an extraordinary amount of capital in a few short weeks. Business Insider
