Citi Has 2,000 Employees Working on Small-Business Loan Program
Citi Has 2,000 Employees Working on Small-Business Loan Program
(Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. said it’s shifted 2,000 employees to help with Paycheck Protection Program loans for small businesses.
The bank has submitted more than 27,500 applications to the Small Business Administration and funded about $3 billion of loans as part of the program, which the U.S. government created to help firms hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. The lender pulled many employees from across its organization to help with the effort, David Chubak, head of U.S. retail banking, said in an internal memo Friday.
“It got to a point where we didn’t care if we didn’t sleep,” Heather Felts, a Citigroup customer response team leader in Florence, Kentucky, said in a blog post about the program. “We just thought to ourselves, ‘We have to get this done. We have to help these people.’”
The lender’s retail-banking footprint is smaller than those of rivals JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., which have each secured more than $25 billion in loans for small businesses. Citigroup has vowed to donate its profits from participation in the program to further support small businesses.
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