Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 10

133 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 10 F I RST BANK $2.5 billion in assets and we’ve pretty much covered the New York and Philadelphia corridor.” Helping businesses came naturally during the pandemic, something which Ryan suggests is due to the bank’s small size, allowing flexibility in processes and decision making. He explains, “When the PPP program first came out, we were able to put together an old-fashioned paper- based manual process, which isn’t ideal, but when you’re dealing with a brand-new program and you don’t have months to get a technology solution up and running, our ability to figure it out the old-fashioned way really helped us. We did a lot of loans for our own customers, as well as folks that were having a hard time getting answers at some of the bigger banks.” In the later part of 2020, First Bank partnered with a fintech company to create a portal for submitting PPP applications. While processing over 1100 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan applications in the first 3 months, First Bank maintained their high level of customer service. As Ryan recounts, “We made sure every customer that was applying for a PPP loan had a dedicated banker who was there to help them through the process. Quite honestly, at the beginning, a lot of it was just trying to manage the uncertainty that businesses felt. Having dedicated bankers available 24/7 to answer calls and help them work through it really made a big difference.” This flexible thinking and personal service had the added benefit of bringing new opportunities to the bank through word-of-mouth referrals. “A lot of it had to do with our willingness to step up right away and embrace the program,” says Ryan. “Some of it was a function of our size, we were big enough, we had enough staff that we could allocate all the customers to various bankers throughout our footprint, but at the same time, we weren’t so big, so bureaucratic, that we couldn’t move quickly.” With such a dramatic increase in loan President and CEO Patrick L. Ryan First Bank employees gave students from Grice Middle School a behind-the-scenes tour of the Bank