SYRACUSE — M&T Bank Corp. (NYSE: MTB), the largest bank in the 16-county Central New York region by deposits, says it made more government-guaranteed loans to small businesses in the Syracuse/Utica region in one week than it did nationally in all of 2019. Buffalo–based M&T Bank approved 1,660 loans, totaling $371 million, in the Syracuse/Utica […]
SYRACUSE — M&T Bank Corp. (NYSE: MTB), the largest bank in the 16-county Central New York region by deposits, says it made more government-guaranteed loans to small businesses in the Syracuse/Utica region in one week than it did nationally in all of 2019.
Buffalo–based M&T Bank approved 1,660 loans, totaling $371 million, in the Syracuse/Utica area under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the emergency forgivable loan program designed to help small companies keep their employees during the coronavirus shutdown. That’s more than the 1,449 total Small Business Administration (SBA)-backed loans M&T processed under all SBA loan programs across the bank last year, according to Julia Berchou, a VP with M&T in Buffalo.
The average loan size of M&T’s PPP loans in our area was nearly $223,500.
M&T Bank approved $6.4 billion in PPP loans for 27,711 companies, employing more than 600,000 people, across its eight-state footprint plus the District of Columbia. The average loan amount was about $233,000. All the loans were to existing M&T customers.
Berchou says M&T deployed a legion of 2,000 employees (most working from home) from across the regional bank to help process the PPP loans over the April 6-13 period. Its usual SBA loan team has 25 employees.
The $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program ran out of money on April 16 after almost 1.7 million loans were made nationally in a mad dash to provide small businesses with emergency relief amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has shut down much of business and daily life in America and New York. The 1 percent loans do not have to be paid back if companies use 75 percent of the money to cover payroll costs and meet other conditions.
The SBA announced it would stop processing PPP loan applications until Congress provided more funding. The Senate on April 21 approved an additional $310 billion for a second round of PPP loans, and the House was expected to approve it on April 23.
This will likely set off a scramble to get a loan by small businesses that were left out of round one and are struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic shutdown.
“… There are still many businesses who were not able to participate. They still need funding to pay their employees and sustain their operations,” Allen Naples, M&T Bank’s Central New York regional president, told CNYBJ in a statement before the 2nd round of funding was approved. “[We are] in constant contact with the Treasury Department, SBA, members of Congress and other government officials to advocate for additional funding and ensure that our customers are not left out of the process because of funding capacity issues at the SBA.”
M&T Bank employs nearly 500 people in its Central New York region, which includes Onondaga, Cayuga, Oswego, Madison, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, Oneida, and Seneca Counties. It holds the No. 1 share of deposits in the Syracuse metro area and the broader 16-county Central New York region that CNYBJ covers.
M&T Bank reported $269 million in net income in this year’s first quarter, down from $493 million in the prior quarter and $483 million in the year-ago earnings period.
