California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank) offers a loan guarantee program that supports small businesses experiencing capital access barriers. The program partners with the state’s Financial Development Corporations that facilitate the loan guarantee program, working with more than a hundred community-based lenders in California. IBank’s loan guarantees can pay participating lenders up to 80% of an eligible outstanding loan amount if the small business is unable to pay. This structure reduces risk and provides liquidity for participating lenders while also enabling more entrepreneurs to access otherwise unavailable capital.
To maximize the program’s reach and impact, IBank needed a solution that could efficiently coordinate loan enrollment and reporting across multiple FDCs and hundreds of community lenders statewide. Collecting standardized data and documentation from a variety of partners, each with different systems and reporting capabilities, while maintaining visibility into the program performance required a centralized platform specifically for multi-partner loan programs.
That’s where CRF Exchange came in.
CRF Exchange is a platform designed to streamline how lenders enroll or sell loans into credit, lending, and capital programs, such as IBank’s guarantee program. The platform helps IBank and its lending partners to digitally collect and report the small business loan information needed to process guarantees and manage the ongoing portfolio reporting.
IBank uses CRF Exchange for both SSBCI and state loan guarantee programs, leveraging the platform’s two-stage approval process to pre-approve loans for guarantee and then finalize approval once loans are made. CRF Exchange collects all required data points and documentation to enroll loans in the guarantee programs, ensuring standardized formatting across all programs while running automated validation to confirm submitted data is accurate and complete. The platform provides real-time visibility into loan review status and portfolio performance for both the FDCs and IBank.
IBank’s quarterly portfolio reporting process previously required collecting Excel spreadsheets from each FDC every quarter. This process is now centralized in CRF Exchange, which validates submitted data to ensure reported balances are accurate. This streamlined approach enables IBank to quickly generate reports required for state and Treasury compliance.
IBank’s experience demonstrates how technology can transform the administration of multi-partner loan programs. By automating data collection, standardizing reporting, and providing visibility, CRF Exchange enables program administrators to focus on creating impact and expanding access to capital for under-resourced small businesses.