Here’s a forward of my experience contacting federally recommended lenders off the SBA PPP website on April 3, basically telling me I can’t work with them since I’m not a customer of theirs, despite the federal website recommending them. My business bank, Bank of America, also was a fail since I do not use them for a credit card or business loan in addition to my checking and that is their requirement. To make things worse, I had a $30K line of credit that I got early this year at Kabbage.com. Today, I logged in and found out the balance was converted to $0.00.
I took a look two days ago and it was $30,000. I got zero email, notice or call about this change. The only news on this I could find came out April 2 and can be seen at pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2020/smbs-accuse-kabbage-of-canceling-credit/ and backs up the fact they suddenly killed everyone’s credit. Worst, Kabbage is my only option for PPP at this point but they are not setup to do it yet and they killed my credit. All I get is an alert signup (kabbage.com/covid-relief/) to be notified when they release that but bad news is I heard PPP is a first come, first serve basis. Anyway, that’s my story so far. Still keeping our agency cloud strong and going but so far our line of credit being killed and no easy way to get PPP is not helping at all. We certainly lost business, too, and in our accounting P&L compared to March 2019 we are down 58 percent and counting. I know we’ll be fine, but it’s certainly hard and I’ve had to cut hours drastically for all my staff among other sharp changes.
Anyway, feel free to have anyone on your team contact me about this. I’m happy to share my story as I know I’m not the only one going through this and this is uncharted waters for all of us. Stay strong guys and thanks for all your support in our community.
Update: Kabbage.com quickly launched that same day, hours after my email to Arnold. I was able to get through it but it was extremely buggy and it was clear it was rushed and had many developer errors, since you couldn’t go back and undo anything—if you made one mistake, your one shot at first-come, first-serve style PPP loans was gone. Luckily, I figured it out and was aware, since I’m a web developer for 20+ years. I got through the application, all to be left with a screen saying they were missing files that I had previously uploaded on the previous step successfully. Clear developer error. They never showed me a page saying, “We received your application” and never sent a confirmation email. I finally got their support on the phone and they admitted it was rushed and had developer errors and they finally updated it to say they successfully got my application on 4/6/20. Glad they have it now and hoping for the best but still no ETA on when you find out if you get the loan or not. Waiting and staying positive as it would greatly help our business thought these challenging times.
Chris Wizner