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How Sunrise Banks used Anvil to multiply their loan processing capacity by 5X

Learn how a Minnesota-based community bank, known as The World's Most Socially Responsible Bank, was able to help businesses keep their doors open by providing emergency loans quickly and efficiently.

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How Sunrise Banks used Anvil to multiply their loan processing capacity by 5X

The Company

Sunrise Banks, a certified B corporation serving communities in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, focuses on offering innovative and financially inclusive products that improve their clients’ lives. As a social engine for good, they’ve redefined profit as doing well and doing good, dispelling long-held misconceptions about being both a bank and a social enterprise.

When the SBA announced the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunrise Banks acted swiftly to implement Anvil to service the demand for PPP loans both from existing and new customers in their community.

  • Founded in 1986
  • Certified B Corporation
  • $127M in PPP loans processed with Anvil
  • ~87% of submitted applications accepted

The Problem

Manual loan processing is time-consuming and inefficient.

When the negative economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear, the SBA announced emergency PPP funding to help small businesses keep their employees on the payroll. With pressure to act quickly because of the first-come, first-served nature of the application process, the Sunrise team started manually processing PDF applications that were often riddled with errors because of missing data validation checks. Email exchanges with customers meant this process was not very secure either. Several team members across business lines diverted their efforts to PPP and were able to process 84 loan applications a day.

As a certified B corporation committed to social responsibility, Sunrise Banks wanted to help many more local businesses but were constrained by an inefficient and ever-evolving loan application process. They needed something “quick, easy, and user-friendly” and identified Anvil as the best solution after running through an evaluation process.

The Solution

End-to-end workflow to save time and unlock growth.

Anvil worked with Sunrise Banks to develop and deploy an “intuitive and descriptive” online PPP loan application process in less than 5 days. The new process included real-time validation checks to eliminate errors and “take the data quality that [was] getting in the door up several percentage points.”

Pin codes protected every application and a secure file upload system was built-in for sensitive supporting documents. In addition, e-signatures were requested at the end of each workflow, and flexible APIs made it easy for Sunrise to pull data into their core banking system.

The Result

From 85 to ~500 PPP loans a day.

With the Anvil PPP loan application, Sunrise Banks was able to process loans 5 times more efficiently, allowing them to complete approximately 500 applications a day and helping many more local businesses beyond their existing customer base.

Their clients found the process to be quick, pain-free, and with more communication than they did from other, larger banks. Anvil allowed Sunrise Banks to support their clients every step of the way through to application completion.

Sunrise Banks is now using Anvil for the PPP loan forgiveness program and plans to use it for other loan programs in the future.

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  • Simplifying data gathering
  • Streamlining document preparation
  • Requesting e-signatures
  • Building and scaling your business
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