CDC Small Business Finance: Nearly 6,000 PPP Loans

Type: Nonprofit mission lender; PPP lender of record
Legal entity: CDC Small Business Finance Corporation, part of the Momentus Capital family of organizations
Main SBA lines: 504 commercial real estate loans, 7(a) loans and microloans

CDC Small Business Finance describes itself as "the nation's leading mission-based SBA small business lender," and says it has provided more than 12,000 small business owners with over $20 billion in financing over four decades.¹ SBA's loan-level file credits it with 5,952 loans and $276.9 million in approved dollars.² Its own testimony to the Senate matches: "CDCSBF funded nearly 6,000 PPP loans on its own, for approximately $275 million. Our median loan was approximately $20,000."³

The PPP book

The loans averaged $46,526 and went to 5,274 borrowers, who reported 34,311 jobs. Modeled loan by loan from SBA's published fee schedule, CDC's processing fees come to $15.4 million: $9.0 million on 2020 first-draw loans, $0.6 million on 2021 first-draw loans and $5.8 million on 2021 second-draw loans, 283rd of 4,688 originating lenders.² SBA never published what it paid each lender. That is about 5.6 cents per approved dollar, against 3.4 cents for KeyBank and 4.2 cents for Regions Bank, because SBA's fee schedule paid a higher rate on smaller loans.⁴⁵

At a House Small Business Committee hearing in September 2021, a witness for the National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders listed CDC Small Business Finance among its member lenders. Those lenders, the testimony said, "were able to provide business clients with PPP loans when banks could not or would not."⁶

What it asked Congress for

Robert Villarreal, chief external affairs officer of Momentus Capital and CDC Small Business Finance, testified to the Senate Small Business Committee on December 14, 2022. He said CDCSBF had again been the number one SBA 504 lender by dollars in the fiscal year just ended, and asked Congress to make SBA's Community Advantage pilot permanent. He pointed to PPP as precedent for a wider funding channel: "During PPP, SBA-approved lenders including non-depository institution lenders, were eligible to participate in the PPPLF," the Federal Reserve's PPP liquidity facility, and he proposed Discount Window access for mission lenders. He also argued against SBA's proposal to license new for-profit small business lending companies.³

Oversight and the Georgia case

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis listed CDC Small Business Finance among the lenders from which it obtained information for its December 2022 report on fintech-channel PPP fraud.⁷

CDC Small Business Finance was a lender victim in United States v. Thomas, a PPP conspiracy in the Northern District of Georgia. Darrell Thomas's plea agreement lists restitution of $3,902,341.04 to CDC Small Business Finance, the largest amount owed to any lender on the list, ahead of Cross River Bank at $2,393,113.19 and Harvest Small Business Finance at $2,285,341.68.⁸ CDC did not need the restitution. SBA had bought the guarantees on the loans, which, prosecutors told the court, made the lenders whole, and in December 2025 they asked the court to substitute SBA as payee for the five lenders in the case family, CDC among them; one CDC loan listed was $797,275 to ML Exotic Customs, Inc., with $773,356.75 still due.⁹ The court granted the substitution on December 31, 2025.¹⁰

Darrell Thomas — defendant whose plea agreement lists CDC Small Business Finance as the largest lender victim.
Harvest Small Business Finance — another lender in the same restitution substitution.
Cross River — another lender in the same restitution substitution.

CDC Small Business Finance

The PPP book

What it asked Congress for

Oversight and the Georgia case

Related profiles

Sources