How does E-Tran work?
Lender A (high level of technological capability or subscribes to a documentation software vendor)
Lenders will have access to E-Tran whether they use commercially available software or an in-house designed program. Either can be easily updated to implement E-tran. Software vendors and lending partners can use the E-tran documentation to customize their software to extract SBA’s required data from their systems. This documentation describes the technology standards and data required to send an Internet file transfer to SBA.
Once implemented, the data is sent to the SBA much like an e-mail attachment. The file transfer data is subjected to the same validation rules and constraints as data entered into the web application. For example, a $5 million SBAExpress loan guaranty request would be screened out for exceeding the “maximum loan amount” business logic coded into the system. In this instance, the system informs the user of the error and requests an acceptable entry for loan amount.
Lender B (has Internet capability, but does not use a software vendor product)
Lenders must log into the system with their user names and passwords, which are entered in the New IT Security system and authenticated against SBA’s Partner Identification Management System (PIMS). The Security system and PIMS serve as the gatekeepers to E-tran. The integration of these three systems prevent a lender with an inactive SBAExpress agreement from processing a SBAExpress loan electronically
Once logged into the system, SBAExpress lenders will enter the data required to receive a loan number, most of which is the same as what is contained on the paper-based SBAExpress forms currently being used by SBAExpress lenders. It is important to note there are some additional data fields required in E-tran that some lenders may be unfamiliar with submitting during the loan guaranty approval process. Upon completion of the data entry, which takes an experienced SBAExpress Lender approximately 15-20 minutes, lenders will validate the data against SBA’s business rules, correct any mistakes, and then submit the loan application. Within minutes the lender will receive an SBA loan number signifying approval of the loan guaranty request.
