PNC Bank, N.A.

Lender or loan platform

PPP

Type: Company or group
Role: Lender or loan platform
Programs: PPP
Updated: September 29, 2026

The profile

The PPP's third-largest lender by dollars, $17.3 billion in 119,352 loans. It told Congress in June 2020 that it had joined "not out of financial considerations"; on the model the SBA owed it about $607 million in fees.

Type: National bank; PPP lender
Parent: The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.

PNC made big PPP loans. The SBA's loan file lists 119,352 of them for $17.3 billion, an average of $145,130, which puts PNC third among all lenders by dollars and 17th by count.¹ Priced loan by loan under the SBA's fee schedule, they carry about $607 million in processing fees.¹² PNC has never published a total. On its July 15, 2020 earnings call an analyst put the fees at "hundreds of millions of dollars," and chief financial officer Rob Reilly answered, "Yes. I think that's right."³ How Much Did PNC Make From Pandemic Relief? works through the figures, including the separate PPP book of BBVA USA, which PNC bought in 2021.

Existing customers only, bigger loans first

PNC took applications only from businesses that already banked with it; a House Select Subcommittee staff report found that "PNC and Truist permitted only existing customers with business banking accounts to apply for PPP."⁴ In the program's first two weeks, April 3 to 16, 2020, the SBA approved 20,562 PNC loans for $8.84 billion, 68 percent of the dollars PNC lent that year.¹

The Subcommittee's report, using PNC's data through July 31, 2020, gave average days from application to funding by loan size: 11.0 days for loans over $5 million and 26.8 days for loans of $100,000 and under.⁴ PNC's letter to the Subcommittee had said: "Simply put, we did not have a 'two track' system that was designed to prioritize applications from larger eligible businesses over those of smaller eligible businesses."⁵ The Subcommittee's findings carry no penalty.

A borrower sued over the queue. Lincoln Network, a nonprofit customer, alleged in April 2020 that PNC "favored their own interests by prioritizing larger loan applications for bigger businesses and PNC's own banking clients ahead of smaller businesses"; it dismissed its case on May 18, 2020.⁶⁷ No court ruled on how PNC ordered its applications.

What PNC told Congress

On June 29, 2020 PNC answered the Subcommittee's questions over the signature of its head of retail lending. "We participated in the PPP primarily because we knew the program was of vital importance in these difficult times to our small business customers and the communities that we serve, not out of financial considerations," the letter said. "As of May 31, 2020, PNC had recognized less than $26 million in revenue," and its "estimated after-tax profit from its participation in PPP is less than $10 million."⁵ Those figures measured what the accounting had released by May 31: PNC deferred the fees and "accreted [them] into Net interest income using the effective yield method, over the contractual life of the loan."⁸ On the model the SBA owed PNC $392.0 million for its 2020 loans alone.¹ We found no PNC pledge to give the fees away.

The agents

Accountants who had helped borrowers apply sued PNC for a share of the fee. In one case PNC described the suit as "an effort to divert an unspecified sum of statutory PPP fees from PNC and 100 other unnamed lenders to unknown third parties."⁹ Winner v. PNC Financial Services Group (N.D. Ill.) was dismissed with prejudice on January 7, 2021, after the parties' stipulation.¹⁰ Henning (W.D. Pa.) and Bookmyer (S.D. Ohio) also named PNC.⁹¹¹ The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation refused to centralize the agent-fee cases on August 5, 2020.¹² The Agents Got Nothing follows them.

PNC Bank, N.A.

Existing customers only, bigger loans first

What PNC told Congress

The agents

Sources

Notes