Ernst & Young processes emergency loans for small business using Microsoft Power Platform

From prototype to production, in weeks, not months

Everything about PPP was time sensitive, including the time available to develop a loan forgiveness solution. For this reason, many of EY’s competitors simply proposed using one of their existing systems to fill out and submit individual PPP forms. Additionally, many of the proposals were only conceptual—no working code.

EY took a different approach. It developed a far more comprehensive solution that collected all documents, performed automatic cross-checks for accuracy, and assembled a complete loan forgiveness application ready for the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to review.

EY was also able to create a working, low code prototype of the supporting system. This even included a live link that provided prospective customers with a hands-on experience directly from their own mobile devices. “Microsoft Power Platform gave the team the extra time we needed to really think through the entire PPP process and optimize our solution,” says Anbarasu. This prototype also helped to establish instant credibility with clients and win business.

“With Microsoft Power Platform, we didn’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts of making a solution work. It just worked,” says Fred Cibelli, Technology Officer for Financial Services Organizations at EY. “We could then focus more on the flow, the data elements that we needed, the UI for the borrower portal—the whole business side of the solution.”

This Microsoft Power Platform agility would carry through the entire project, resulting in amazingly fast delivery times. “We were able to go from prototype to production in just 12 weeks. That would not have been possible without Microsoft Power Platform,” says Ryan Battles, Financial Services Banking & Capital Markets Principal at EY. To put that in perspective, a similar solution using custom code would have taken five to six months, according to Anbarasu.

A complete application process 

The PPP Loan Forgiveness solution that EY created consists primarily of two different applications: a borrower portal using Power Pages, and the lender application using a Power Apps model-driven app. Both interact with the same data that is stored within Dataverse.

Each bank is provided with its own branded instance of the borrower portal and the lender app, and emails to a bank’s PPP customers also carried unique bank branding.

The solution works seamlessly with multiple third-party services using both prebuilt and custom connectors. This ability to connect with multiple third-party services using Microsoft Power Platform was one of the most important aspects of the solution. It’s what enabled the tool to cover the entire application process and submit a complete loan forgiveness application—something other competitors couldn’t match.

Multiple security tools and services were added to manage highly sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data. Data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. Native interoperability with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) provides multi-factor authentication and role-based authentication. Connectors enable role-based authorization to third-party services. Ultimately, the solution passed an InfoSec approval for handling C3 and C4 level data and PII. The banks also conducted an independent evaluation of Microsoft Power Platform.

Also, according to Anbarasu, a modular architecture helps isolate issues, troubleshoot quickly, and enables deploying changes faster and with minimal impact to the overall solution.

Here’s how it all works:

1. Loan data from bank is imported into tool. Once the contract has been signed with a bank, the loan data from the bank is imported in an agreed-upon CSV or JSON format. These files are uploaded to an SFTP site that is powered by MOVEit Managed File Transfer (MFT). The Power Automate connector with MOVEit constantly polls the site. If there is a CSV file with a specific naming convention that has been uploaded, the file is downloaded and injected into staging tables within Dataverse.

2. Borrower is alerted. As soon as the loan data is transformed and loaded into Dataverse entities, another Power Automate process initiates an email inviting the borrower to apply for loan forgiveness via a link to the portal. The app uses a connection to SendGrid email automation. This allows each bank to create an email ID within its domain, which is what the user sees in the email communications.

3. Borrower self-registers in Power Pages. To kick off the application process, the borrower registers inside the portal using their loan number and the phone number that they gave to the bank. This information is automatically cross-checked against existing loan records. Once self-registered, the borrower creates user credentials that are stored in Azure Active Directory B2C.

4. Borrower enters loan criteria and supporting documents. Once a customer signs in to the portal, their PPP loan details are automatically displayed. The borrower selects the relevant loan forgiveness options and uploads supporting documentation (for example, payroll documents, mortgage statements, and utility invoices).

5. System scans and cross-checks documentation. Using a tool driven by Azure Cognitive Services, documents are automatically scanned, and relevant data is extracted and cross-checked with loan data. If there are mismatches, the operations team is automatically prompted and follows up with the borrower. Also, data is cross-checked against external sources. If a W-2 payroll document is uploaded, for example, the API interoperability with ADP enables verification.

6. Calc engine calculates loan forgiveness. This is a custom-coded component built as a microservice managed in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Because the loan eligibility and forgiveness criteria were frequently changing, the calc engine was built outside the platform so changes wouldn’t impact the rest of the Microsoft Power Platform solution.

7. Bank and EY review documents in lender application. This is a model-driven app that the bank accesses using SSO with Azure AD B2B federation (the EY operations team using Azure AD). The app displays all the data that the borrower has submitted and enables several review processes.

8. Approved applications are packaged, signed, and sent. Once a loan forgiveness application is complete, the borrower’s data is automatically packaged using approved SBA templates. A prebuilt connector to DocuSign enables the borrower to sign the package, and then it is sent to the SBA via a custom connector to the SBA’s E-Tran service. From there, the SBA determines which portion of a loan can be forgiven based on the application. 

The solution also features additional elements such as a connection to ServiceNow. This provides integrated technical support and automatically creates incident tickets (for example, if a loan import fails or the Doc Intelligence service could not extract data correctly). Additionally, interoperability with Power BI provides the bank with dashboards displaying real-time metrics, such as the number of loans processed, time to process, quality check logs, and performance reports for EY’s VOC team.

A business driver—now and in the future 

Since development of the first prototype, EY has won contracts with multiple banks involved in the PPP program. Most of the banks are smaller, regional banks as they processed more PPP loans due to small businesses relying more on local banks—a relatively new source of business for EY, which has typically catered to the larger banks.

Using the tool, EY has been able to process over 50,000 loans totaling more than $10 billion on behalf of its banking customers. What’s more, as the number of PPP loan forgiveness applications has soared, the value of an automated process has also grown.

The tool has also become a model for other product development efforts at EY. “The solution really proved to us how Microsoft Power Platform can be used for complex architecture—and how easy it is to tie in with other enterprise applications as well as our own custom components,” says Battles.

With that combination of speed and flexibility, Microsoft Power Platform has already set EY up for one major win with customers—and there will no doubt be more like it in the future.