Regions Financial in Birmingham, Ala., has hired the former head of Small Business Administration lending at Capital One Financial to fill a similar role.
Caroline Taylor has been named the $147 billion-asset company's head of SBA lending, Regions said in a news release Thursday. She takes the job just as
Taylor's immediate mission is to expand Regions's SBA lending team, with an eye toward translating the momentum from PPP into long-term growth in small-business loans, especially among the underserved.
“As the economy opens up and slowly returns to normal, the challenge is how we reallocate resources of PPP,” Taylor said in an interview.
About $3.6 billion of the $5 billion of PPP loans Regions originated last year were still on its books on Dec. 31. Executives said during a January call to discuss fourth-quarter earnings that the company was on pace to make another $2 billion of PPP loans during the program's second phase.
“Our target is steady and on pace for that,” Taylor said.
While there is a streamlined forgiveness procedure for PPP loans under $150,000, the documentation and review process will be daunting for those that have taken out second loans under the program. Balancing the ability to underwrite more loans, while effectively processing forgiveness, “will definitely be a challenge,” Taylor said.
After joining the $422 billion-asset Capital One as an SBA credit underwriting manager in 2013, Taylor helped the company increase the size of its SBA book by 20%, to more than $300 million of loans, Regions said in its release. Before joining Capital One, she was an SBA private business loan underwriter at Wells Fargo.
Taylor joined Regions after getting assurance from top executives that they were making SBA loan growth a priority, she said. As the team looks to expand its dealings with the SBA, the company will have a focus on reaching out to women and minority small-business owners who have historically had less access to financing backed by the agency.
“It’s something we will definitely have an awareness of,” Taylor said. “We want to have a tight focus on who is being served and what gaps we have.”
