How Much Did Cross River Bank Make From Pandemic Relief?

I. At most $1.03 billion, before the partners' cut

The SBA never published what it paid each PPP lender. Our fee model supplies the number instead. It takes every loan in the SBA's loan-level file and prices it under the schedule in force when the loan was made. For Cross River the model gives $1,034.6 million (PPP lenders by estimated fees). That is fourth among 4,688 originating lenders, behind JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Prestamos CDFI. The series ranking of fee collectors adds agents and contractors and ranks each on its fees after documented payments to agents. There Cross River is fifth, behind Womply (ranked on its billings and covered in its own piece), JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Blueacorn.

The table sets it beside the other figures that bear on what the bank ended up with. They are different kinds of number:

Question	Figure	Kind
SBA processing fees accrued on Cross River's own loans, 2020–2021	$1,034.6M	modeled
of which on 2020 loans / 2021 loans	$294.0M / $740.6M	modeled
Owed by the SBA and unpaid, December 2022	more than $300M	company statement to a newspaper
Paid to fintech partners out of those fees	not public	contracts cited in congressional and bankruptcy records
Interest spread on PPP loans funded by the Federal Reserve, 2020–2025	$102M–$107M	modeled from Fed disclosures
Net income of the whole bank, 2020–2022	$543.0M	FDIC call reports

The $1.03 billion is an accrual. It assumes the SBA paid a fee on every loan in the file. If the more than $300 million the bank said it was owed was all processing fees, and none was ever paid, its fee receipts come to about $735 million, before partner payments. Whether the SBA later paid it is not in any public record we found.

The partner payments cannot be sized. BlueVine's lawyers told Congress that Cross River paid BlueVine fees for its PPP work, and Cross River told a bankruptcy court that it had prepaid Kabbage for servicing. Neither amount is public.

II. Who paid whom: a charter, a portal and a fee schedule

The first PPP rule set the lender's fee at 5 percent of loans up to $350,000, 3 percent up to $2 million and 1 percent above that (85 FR 20811, § III.3.d). The loans paid 1 percent interest and carried a 100 percent SBA guarantee. The SBA explained the rate in the same rule (§ III.2.i): "This higher yield combined with the fact that the loans are 100 percent guaranteed by the SBA and the fact that lenders will receive a substantial processing fee from the SBA provide ample inducement for lenders to participate in the PPP."

An agent who helped a borrower apply was paid by the lender, "out of the fees the lender receives from SBA," and never by the borrower (85 FR 20811, § III.4.c). Under the CARES Act, PPP loans carried a zero percent risk weight, and the bank regulators let banks "neutralize the regulatory capital effects" of borrowing against them at the Fed (Regulatory Capital Rule, 85 FR 20387).

The 2021 rules changed the small-loan fee. For loans of $50,000 or less the lender got "the lesser of fifty (50) percent or $2,500." The SBA was to pay "not later than 5 days after the reported disbursement," and could not make the lender repay the fee "unless the lender is found guilty of an act of fraud in connection with the PPP loan" (86 FR 3692, at 3708; the second-draw rule, 86 FR 3712, uses the same tiers).

Say a restaurant applied through a fintech app in May 2020 for a $20,000 loan, with Cross River as lender of record. The SBA paid Cross River 5 percent, $1,000, and guaranteed the whole loan. Cross River could pledge the note to the Fed and borrow the $20,000 at 0.35 percent. The fintech that ran the application was paid by Cross River, on its contract. The same loan approved in March 2021 paid Cross River $2,500.

Cross River supplied the part the fintechs lacked. Chairman James Clyburn's May 2021 letter to the bank described the arrangement as a "rent-a-charter" model, in which "banks such as Cross River typically agree to ensure regulatory compliance and other banking rules, while the FinTech partners focus on user interfaces and platforms" (Clyburn letter to Gilles Gade, p. 4). BlueVine's lawyers put the division of labor in fee terms. The banks, they wrote, "submitted various lender forms (e.g., Form 1502, which is required in order to receive lender fees from the SBA)" and were "the beneficiaries of the PPP loan guarantees" (BlueVine letters to the Select Subcommittee, Aug. 20, 2021). The fee arrived at the bank, and the bank paid its partners.

Cross River said it opened its own PPP portal on April 3, 2020, the program's first day, took applicants "without requiring preexisting banking relationships," and "partnered with over 30 leading technology companies" (Cross River release, Jan. 6, 2021). Before the program, Fortune reported, the bank had made $50 million of SBA-backed loans in all of 2019 (Fortune, "Meet the one-branch bank that did more PPP lending than Citi," July 15, 2020).

III. Whose loans: what the SBA file shows, and what it does not

The SBA file names Cross River as originating lender on 478,866 loans totaling $12.89 billion and as servicer of every one of them, at a single lender location (SBA PPP loan-level data, Sept. 30, 2024 release). It has no field for the fintech that brought the borrower in. Partner-channel volumes have to come from the partners' own papers, and only one channel shows up in the SBA data at all.

Kabbage. Kabbage signed a loan program agreement with Cross River on April 13, 2020, to market the bank's PPP program, process loans "as CRB's agent" and subservice them (Kabbage first-day declaration, ¶ 32). On May 6, 2020 a second agreement let Kabbage sell Cross River loans it had made itself. By Kabbage's bankruptcy count, it serviced about 122,000 Cross River loans for $3.05 billion, all from 2020 (¶ 25, rounded). The SBA file shows the sold loans: 75,837 loans for $1.57 billion that list Kabbage, Inc. as originating lender and Cross River as servicer, all approved between April and August 2020. On our reading of the declaration, which counts those purchases inside the 122,000, about 46,000 loans and $1.5 billion of Cross River's own originations came through Kabbage. The fees on the 75,837 purchased loans, $74.6 million on the model, sit in Kabbage's column, because the SBA paid the originating lender. Cross River told the Subcommittee it ended the partnership in August 2020, citing among other things "process and documentation issues" (House report, p. 69).

BlueVine. In the House report's account, BlueVine "worked exclusively" with Celtic Bank and Cross River and delivered $8.9 billion to more than 300,000 businesses across both banks (House report, p. 73). It told the Subcommittee it had submitted about 355,000 applications to Cross River and 100,000 to Celtic. Subcommittee staff asked about a July 2020 amendment requiring BlueVine to send Cross River at least half its applications. BlueVine's lawyers answered that the bank "wanted to ensure it would receive a sufficient number of applications in return for the fees it paid BlueVine for its services during the PPP" (BlueVine letters, Sept. 9, 2022). Applications are not loans, and no document gives BlueVine's loan count or dollar volume at Cross River.

Intuit, ApplePie and the bank's own portal. Cross River's PPP support page sends borrowers who got loans "directly through Cross River, through ApplePie or BlueVine, or through Kabbage" to one servicer, and 2020 borrowers who came "through Intuit QuickBooks" to Intuit (Cross River PPP support page). BlueVine's lawyers added that Cross River "also had multiple partnerships with other third-party providers during PPP." None of these channels has a published loan count.

IV. The model, and what moves it

Cross River's own loans	Loans	Dollars	Modeled fees	Fee per loan	Fees per dollar lent
2020 first draw	193,044	$6,382.6M	$294.0M	$1,523	4.6¢
2021 first draw	200,772	$3,921.8M	$500.2M	$2,491	12.8¢
2021 second draw	85,050	$2,590.2M	$240.4M	$2,827	9.3¢
Total	478,866	$12,894.7M	$1,034.6M	$2,161	8.0¢

The bank lent about the same amount in each year: $6.38 billion in 2020 and $6.51 billion in 2021. The 2021 loans earned 2.5 times the fees. The average 2021 first-draw loan was $19,534, and the average fee on it was $2,491.50, $8.50 under the cap.

Small loans carried the book. Loans of $50,000 or less were 91.5 percent of Cross River's loans and produced 75.2 percent of its modeled fees. Across the whole program, lenders were owed 4.8 cents in fees per dollar lent; JPMorgan Chase was owed 4.1 cents on loans averaging $94,700, and Cross River 8.0 cents on loans averaging $26,928. Customers Bank, another fintech-partnered bank, came in at 8.8 cents.

Three things move the $1.03 billion.

What the SBA did not pay. In December 2022 the SBA named Cross River among eight lenders it would investigate. The bank's senior vice president for public affairs, Phil Goldfeder, then pointed NJBIZ to more than $300 million that, he said, the SBA owed the bank, and on which the agency would give no timeline (NJBIZ, "Cross River Bank caught in PPP lending report crosshairs," Dec. 14, 2022). NJBIZ's account of the remark does not say what the payment was for. Cross River's last PPP loans had been approved in May 2021, and the 2021 rule gave the SBA five days after disbursement to pay the fee.

What the partners took. The contract terms are not public. The one partner fee with a number on it comes from the other bank Kabbage worked for. Kabbage said Customers Bank owed it about $65.5 million in referral and servicing fees on about $800 million of 2021 loans; Cross River quoted the figure in its bankruptcy objection (Cross River objection, ¶ 7). That is 8.2 cents per dollar lent, against 12.8 cents in modeled SBA fees on Cross River's own 2021 first-draw loans.

What happened to the loans. Once paid, a fee stayed paid: the 2021 rule barred clawback unless the lender itself was found guilty of fraud. Of Cross River's loans, 72,271, or 15.1 percent, carry the status "Charged Off" in the SBA file, against 5.6 percent program-wide; they carried $165.2 million of the modeled fees. The site's charge-off table compares each lender's loans with comparable loans elsewhere, same draw, size band, borrower type and month, and puts Cross River at 1.86 times the expected count (PPP charge-offs by lender). A charge-off is not a finding of fraud; the status covers loans that defaulted or were never forgiven, for any reason.

V. The Fed's money: $10 billion at 0.35 percent

Cross River took its first advance from the Federal Reserve's PPP Liquidity Facility on April 17, 2020, eight days after the Fed announced it (Federal Reserve, April 9, 2020). The facility lent against PPP loans at 0.35 percent, non-recourse. Cross River's balance peaked at $10.01 billion at the end of April 2021 (PPPLF disclosures, report as of April 30, 2021). At June 30, 2021 it was $9,949,578,816, the same figure, in thousands, that the bank reported to the FDIC as PPP loans pledged to the facility (PPPLF disclosures, June 30, 2021; FDIC call-report data, 2019Q4–2022Q4). That quarter the bank carried $11.23 billion of PPP loans and $3.48 billion of deposits. The last balance, $290.3 million at May 31, 2025, is gone from the June 30, 2025 report (May 31, 2025; June 30, 2025).

The PPP loans paid 1 percent and the Fed charged 0.35 percent. Applied to Cross River's month-end balances from June 2020 through May 2025, the spread comes to $102 million to $107 million, and the Fed's interest to $55 million to $58 million. That is our model, and it is interest, outside the $1.03 billion of fees.

Cross River's assets went from $2.53 billion at March 31, 2020 to $9.91 billion three months later; $6.27 billion of the new assets were PPP loans, $6.12 billion of them pledged to the Fed (call reports). By September 2020 assets were $11.8 billion. American Banker reported that regulators had excused PPP lenders of Cross River's size from the stricter supervision that normally starts at $10 billion (American Banker, Dec. 8, 2020).

The bank's net income, as reported to the FDIC, was $42.8 million in 2019, $91.1 million in 2020, $372.0 million in 2021 and $80.0 million in 2022. The 2021 figure is 8.7 times 2019's. The call reports do not break out PPP fees.

VI. The record: Congress, the SBA, the FDIC and the courts

The Clyburn letter (May 27, 2021). The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote to Cross River, Kabbage, BlueVine and Celtic on the same day. Its letter said Cross River collected "around $2,200 per loan, often sharing a portion with partner FinTechs." Citing the New York Post, it said the bank had been paid "approximately $160 million" in PPP fees as of July 2020 (Clyburn letter, p. 4). The model puts the fees on loans Cross River approved in April through June 2020 alone at $231.8 million. The letter's first question was "How much is Cross River's total revenue from facilitating PPP loans to date?" Its ninth asked for every partner's "revenue sharing and liability sharing agreements" (pp. 6–7). The answers are not public.

The House report (Dec. 1, 2022). The staff report quoted an internal email from Cross River's chief risk officer, sent April 3, 2020, the day the program opened: "there will be fraud rings going after these [PPP] funds" (p. 17). It cited a University of Texas study naming "the four largest FinTech lenders, Cross River [Bank], Prestamos…, Harvest…, and Capital Plus" for "high rates of misreporting and large lending volume growth" (p. 16). It recorded that Cross River had dropped Kabbage (p. 69) and had reviewed BlueVine's fraud controls periodically, "including in advance of each new PPP round" (p. 77). The report's findings carry no penalty.

The SBA (Dec. 8, 2022). A week later the SBA suspended Womply and Blueacorn and said it had "launched a full investigation of the lenders," Cross River among them (SBA statement). Cross River was not suspended. We found no published result of that investigation.

The FDIC (March 8, 2023). Cross River consented, without admitting or denying the charges, to an FDIC order. The order cites "unsafe or unsound banking practices related to its compliance with applicable fair lending laws" and violations of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Truth in Lending Act, found in a May 3, 2021 examination (FDIC consent order, FDIC-22-0040b). The order does not mention PPP. It barred the bank from signing a new third-party partner or offering a new credit product without the FDIC Regional Director's written non-objection, and it stays in force "unless and until it is modified, terminated, suspended, or set aside."

The courts. On April 30, 2020, loan agents seeking unpaid PPP agent fees sued Wintrust, Bank of America, Cross River and 4,971 other named and unnamed defendants in federal court in Chicago, alleging damages that could exceed $3.8 billion. The December 2020 relief law then stated that lenders owe agents no fee without a fee agreement. The court entered the plaintiff's voluntary dismissal on January 22, 2021 (Wintrust Form 10-Q, Q1 2021; the wider fight is in The Agents Got Nothing).

In Maryland, Cross River sued a borrower it had "mistakenly funded" "in the amount of $1,706,711 (the maximum loan amount that 3 Bea's qualified for under the PPP was $20,680)." When the bank tried to recall the loan, the court wrote, it "was only able to recall $4,717.53 from 3 Bea's bank account." The Fourth Circuit vacated part of the bank's judgment in June 2025, and the case was back in the district court in April 2026 (Cross River v. 3 Bea's, D. Md., opinion of April 21, 2026).

In Kabbage's bankruptcy, Cross River described itself as "likely the largest unsecured creditor of the Debtors," having "prepaid the Debtors for servicing fees" (Cross River objection, ¶ 14 n.3). It pressed repurchase and indemnification claims under its Kabbage contracts (first-day declaration, ¶ 55).

In U.S. v. Epstein, a Maryland businessman sentenced in May 2025, Cross River was among the institutions he defrauded (DOJ release, May 8, 2025). We found no Justice Department action against the bank.

VII. What the bank said, and what the documents say

In December 2020 the bank announced two industry awards. Its founder and chief executive, Gilles Gade, said: "At the very onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cross River recognized the extraordinary opportunity we had to help those in need" (Cross River release, Dec. 10, 2020). American Banker, two days earlier, reported that Gade had mobilized the bank's 300 employees, "diving headfirst into PPP without adding staff."

In January 2021 the bank said it had provided "more than $6.5 billion in relief to 198,738 small businesses" in the first round. The SBA file lists 193,044 Cross River first-draw loans approved in 2020, for $6.38 billion.

In July 2020 Phil Goldfeder told Fortune that "PPP demonstrated that fintech is the great equalizer." After the SBA named the bank in December 2022, he told American Banker that the House report "actually lauded the work of responsible banks like Cross River" (Banking Dive, Dec. 9, 2022), and NJBIZ that the report "vindicated Cross River." The report's section on BlueVine's two banks is headed "Federally-Regulated Bank Partners Successfully Pressured Bluevine to Improve Its Controls During the PPP, Likely Reducing Fraud" (p. 74). Four pages later it called Cross River's approach "comparatively less hands-on" than Celtic's. Citing a University of Texas graph, it said that "nearly 20 percent of Cross River's loans had at least one suspicious indicator, as compared to approximately 10 percent of Celtic's" (p. 78).

In February 2026 Axios reported that Cross River had picked banks to lead an initial public offering, and that its profit for 2025 was about $24 million (Axios, Feb. 20, 2026).

Method, and what would change the numbers

Modeled figures. Fees are the SBA loan-level file (Sept. 30, 2024 release) priced loan by loan under 85 FR 20811 for 2020 first-draw loans and under 86 FR 3692 and 86 FR 3712 for 2021 loans, summed by originating lender; loans whose undisbursed amount equals or exceeds the approved amount are dropped. The figures match the fee ranking and the fee schedules by vintage. They are accruals, not a record of payment. The PPPLF spread applies the 1 percent note rate and the 0.35 percent facility rate to the month-end balances in the Fed's disclosures; the range covers April 17 to May 31, 2020, which the files do not report.

Documented figures. Balance-sheet, PPPLF-pledge and net-income figures are FDIC call-report data for FDIC certificate 58410. PPPLF balances are the Fed's transaction-specific disclosures. Partner-channel figures are Kabbage's first-day declaration (Bankr. D. Del. No. 22-10951, Doc 13) and BlueVine's letters to the Subcommittee. The $65.5 million owed to Kabbage is Kabbage's figure as Cross River's objection repeats it.

Claims. The $300 million-plus owed by the SBA is the bank's statement, as NJBIZ reported it. The $2,200 a loan and $160 million are the Clyburn letter's estimates from press reports. The University of Texas misreporting rates are a study's findings as the House report quotes them.

Documents that would close the gaps. Cross River's answers to the Clyburn letter, including its PPP revenue and its partners' revenue-sharing agreements; the BlueVine, Kabbage, Intuit and ApplePie contracts; the SBA's record of fees paid to Cross River; and the result of the SBA's 2022 investigation.

The same model is used in the article on Womply, whose 2020 referral partners included Cross River, and on the lender pages for JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Celtic Bank, Customers Bank and Kabbage. Profiles: Cross River, Kabbage, BlueVine, Celtic Bank, Customers Bank, Intuit QuickBooks Capital. Case files: In re KServicing, PPP agent fees litigation, Cross River v. 3 Bea's.

Sources: SBA PPP loan-level data (Sept. 30, 2024 release), priced under 85 FR 20811, 86 FR 3692 and 86 FR 3712; Regulatory Capital Rule, 85 FR 20387 (Apr. 13, 2020); FDIC call-report data, Cross River Bank, 2019Q4–2022Q4; Federal Reserve PPPLF transaction-specific disclosures, reports as of April 30, 2021, June 30, 2021, May 31, 2025 and June 30, 2025; Clyburn letter to Gilles Gade (May 27, 2021); Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, "We Are Not the Fraud Police" (Dec. 1, 2022); BlueVine letters to the Select Subcommittee (June 11 and Aug. 20, 2021; Sept. 9, 2022); SBA statement (Dec. 8, 2022); FDIC consent order FDIC-22-0040b (Mar. 8, 2023); Kabbage first-day declaration and Cross River objection, Bankr. D. Del. No. 22-10951; Wintrust Form 10-Q, Q1 2021; Cross River v. 3 Bea's, D. Md. No. 8:21-cv-03210, opinion of April 21, 2026; U.S. v. Epstein, D. Md., DOJ release (May 8, 2025); Cross River releases of Dec. 10, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021; Cross River PPP support page; American Banker (Dec. 8, 2020); Banking Dive (Dec. 9, 2022); Axios (Feb. 20, 2026); NJBIZ, "Cross River Bank caught in PPP lending report crosshairs" (Dec. 14, 2022); Fortune, "Meet the one-branch bank that did more PPP lending than Citi" (July 15, 2020). The House report is a partisan staff document released by the Democratic majority's staff in the final weeks of the 117th Congress, with no public hearing and no sworn testimony; an arbitrator refused it as "rank hearsay" that relied on companies then in arbitration with Womply, and a federal judge declined to take judicial notice of its findings (about the report).