Wintrust outlines number of businesses seeking paycheck loans

ROSEMONT - Wintrust Financial Corp. Wednesday said it has received 6,973 applications for $1.27 billion in loans since Jan. 11 in the latest round of the Paycheck Protection Program initiated by the U.S. Treasury Department and Small Business Administration.

Wintrust has received funding authorization from the SBA for approximately 96% of its clients, the company said. To date, Wintrust has funded $4.59 billion in PPP loans since the beginning of the program in March 2020.

Historically, Wintrust ranks as one of the largest SBA lenders in the communities served by its 15 community banks. For this latest round of the PPP program, Wintrust received more than $1.11 billion in loan requests from 6,030 small businesses in Illinois. It has received $75.5 million in loan requests from 639 small businesses in Wisconsin.

An additional $95.8 million in loan requests have been received from 304 small business borrowers with operations in other states around the country, Wintrust said.

The median loan size is approximately $57,000 - demonstrating the relief provided by Wintrust community banks is to very small businesses, it said.