How Banks Can Profit from SBA Lending

All community banks are looking for ways to leverage their staff, maximize profit, minimize expense and build flexibility into their loan portfolios.

One effective way to do this is to participate in SBA lending and to use an SBA outsource provider to provide your bank with a simple and cost effective way to offer this product.

The primary SBA lending program, the SBA 7(a) guaranty loan, allows the bank to make small business loans and receive a 75 percent guarantee from the U.S. government. The guaranteed portions of these loans can be sold in the secondary market, with current gain on sale premiums of 13.5 percent net to the bank. So if a bank makes a $1 million SBA loan and sells the $750,000 guaranteed portion, it will generate a premium or fee income of $101,250.

In addition, when the guaranteed portion of an SBA loan is sold, the investor buys the guaranty at a rate that is 1 percent less than the note rate. In this example, if you have a $1 million SBA loan at an interest rate of 6 percent and the bank sells the $750,000 guaranteed piece, the investor buys it at a 1 percent discount off the note rate and receives a yield of 5 percent. This means that the bank will earn 6 percent on the $250,000 portion that they retained and 1 percent on the $750,000 or $7,500 per year, not accounting for amortization of the loan. If you compare that $7,500 per year in servicing income to the $250,000 that the bank retains on its books, you can see that it represents an additional 3 percent yield on the retained portion. That 3 percent of servicing, plus the note rate of 6 percent, shows that the bank’s gross yield on the retained portion of the loan is now 9 percent. This additional yield is something to consider if your bank is competing for a loan with a larger bank that is trying to undercut your bank on pricing. The added servicing income will enable you to maintain your yield even on loans that have lower pricing.

While SBA lending can be very profitable, it should be viewed as more than just a profit center for your bank.

The SBA loan guarantee can be used to refinance existing loans to mitigate risk in your loan portfolio or to help retain clients who are close to the bank’s legal lending limits. Using SBA lending to refinance existing bank loans can be helpful in reducing real estate concentrations since properties like hotels, mini storage facilities and care facilities are included as investment properties by regulators. If a bank has these types of properties on their books, they can often refinance the loan and sell the guaranteed portion to reduce a concentration and free up capital. Using the SBA guaranty to make loans that fall into an investment property category is a good way of managing portfolio concentrations.

Why does SBA outsourcing make sense?
Outsourcing your SBA lending department eliminates the need to allocate resources and budget for an SBA department since there are no upfront or overhead costs associated with it. Outsourcing eliminates the risk of hiring an SBA team and then not generating sufficient loan volume to support the cost of that staff. SBA personnel costs are high, and it can be difficult to find qualified people. Also, without an experienced and dedicated SBA group, your loan officers will typically avoid handling SBA loan applications for fear of dealing with the complex SBA rules and process.

Outsourcing also enables a community bank to acquire, through the outsource provider, an experienced staff, which in turn enables it to provide an accurate and efficient process to its SBA borrowers. An SBA outsource provider can efficiently process, document, close, sell to the secondary market and service your loans. Typically these services charge between 0.6 percent to 2 percent of the loan amount.

Conclusion
In today’s competitive market, the SBA program offers too many profit enhancement and risk mitigation opportunities to simply ignore its value. In order to maximize success, bankers need to have every tool available to them.