SYRACUSE, N.Y. — M&T Bank Corp., the biggest 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.
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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 Thursday morning after almost 1.7 million loans were made nationally in a mad scramble to provide small businesses 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. Congress is currently deadlocked on a proposal to provide $250 billion in additional PPP funding.
“While the Paycheck Protection Program provides an important source of much-needed funding, the program is now out of money and there are still many businesses who were not able to participate. They still need funding to pay their employees and sustain their operations,” says Allen Naples, M&T Bank’s Central New York regional president. “[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.
