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Chip Mahan

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
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PPP
Updated

The profile

Founder, chairman and chief executive of Live Oak Bancshares, the Wilmington, North Carolina parent of Live Oak Bank. The bank made 14,930 PPP loans for $2.3 billion; its average loan, about $154,600, was three times Wells Fargo's.

Identity and role

James S. "Chip" Mahan III founded Live Oak Bancshares and serves as its chief executive officer and chairman. The holding company is based at 1741 Tiburon Drive, Wilmington, North Carolina, and its commercial bank, Live Oak Bank, lends to and takes deposits from small businesses nationwide. The company calls it "the nation's leading SBA lender." On the company's July 2020 and January 2021 earnings calls he was listed as chairman and CEO.

Biography / career arc

Mahan started in 1973 at Wachovia Bank & Trust Co. in Winston-Salem, after a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington & Lee University. The rest of the record comes from Live Oak's own board biography. He became chairman and chief executive of Citizens Union National Bank & Trust Co. in 1984; in 1986 he formed an investment group that bought Citizens Union and later sold it to BankOne Corp. of Columbus, Ohio. He then launched Cardinal Bancshares, which grew to about $675 million in assets and went public in 1992.

Next came Security First Network Bank, which he founded and the biography calls "the world's first internet bank," and S1 Corporation, the banking-software company he ran as chairman and chief executive. The biography says S1 grew to $234 million in revenue in six years and peaked above $6 billion in market value. Mahan then founded Live Oak. He also co-founded the banking-software company nCino and the core-banking platform Finxact, and is a managing partner and co-founder of Canapi Ventures, a group of funds that invests in financial-technology start-ups.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Live Oak came to PPP as an SBA 7(a) lender. PPP loans carried a 100% SBA guaranty. Under the SBA's April 2020 rule, an agent who helped a borrower apply could be paid by the lender, never the borrower, up to 1% of a loan of $350,000 or less, 0.50% up to $2 million and 0.25% above that.

By our count of the SBA's PPP loan-level data, Live Oak Banking Company originated 14,930 PPP loans for $2.31 billion: 11,044 loans ($1.76 billion) approved in 2020 and 3,886 ($0.55 billion) in 2021. The average loan was about $154,600. For comparison, Wells Fargo Bank averaged about $49,500 across 280,717 loans and JPMorgan Chase Bank about $97,800 across 452,892. Square Capital averaged about $9,400.

Their own relief

Live Oak was a lender, and the SBA's PPP data show no loan to Live Oak Bancshares or Live Oak Banking Company as a borrower. The North Carolina borrowers with "Live Oak" in their names are unrelated businesses. No relief loan to Mahan personally appears in the documents cited here.

Mahan has not been charged with any crime. Live Oak Banking Company was one of seven lenders sued in American Video Duplicating, Inc. v. Citibank, N.A. (C.D. Cal. No. 2:20-cv-03815), filed April 27, 2020. The plaintiffs, loan agents who had helped borrowers prepare PPP applications, said the lenders had received lender fees from the federal government and refused to pay agents any share. On November 16, 2020 Judge Otis D. Wright II granted the lenders' motions to dismiss, holding that the CARES Act "does not provide a private cause of action to recover agent fees absent an agreement between agent and lender"; he allowed one more amendment. The parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal with prejudice on February 2, 2021.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Live Oak's board page lists Mahan as chief executive and chairman, and names Neil Underwood, a director since 2008, as the company's president until November 2023. Mahan also sits on the boards of Apiture, a joint venture of Live Oak and Fiserv, and the cybersecurity firm DefenseStorm.

Sources

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