Bank president through my DMs on PPP loans, SBA clearance, and timelines:

"I run a $2B+ commercial bank. For banks that were not prior active SBA lenders (which turns out to be a lot), the application for the bank to *participate* only became available last night."

"In a bit of irony, it was a corrupted PDF that took about an hour for Treasury/SBA to notice and fix. Mechanism was to fill out a form, PDF it, and sent it to a shared email @ SBA. Informally, we are hearing that it may take several weeks to be “approved” by SBA."

"At that point, we would need access to a new platform SBA is trying to spin up at AWS (doesn’t exist yet), where we would submit a separate bank-completed application, again a PDF form, and wait for issuance of a guarantee, at which point in theory we could make the loan."

"Except SBA doesn’t have a loan agreement or promissory note, and when we asked if we could use our own home drafted by our lawyers, they indicated that might void any guarantee. Obviously Catch 22 here."

"We can bridge some of our best customers with new debt on our own docs, especially if we have access to other collateral - RE usually - but PPP simply not functional right now for most banks.”