A rocky start to the second round of emergency small-business loans, courtesy of the Paycheck Protection Program, turned in favor of small lenders last week.

The Small Business Administration only accepted loans from lending institutions with asset sizes less than $1 billion from 4-11:59 p.m. on Wednesday.

“The SBA is working to ensure that all eligible small businesses have access to this funding to sustain their businesses and keep their employees on payroll,” said U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Jovita Carranza and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin in a joint statement.

It was welcome news for smaller banks, especially after a bottleneck brought the SBA’s ETran system to a halt on parts of Monday and Tuesday, leaving many lenders frozen out of submitting loan applications for businesses.

“I feel bad for the small-business owners,” said Craig Zurn, president and chief executive officer of Jim Thorpe Neighborhood Bank. “We were able to submit four applications for businesses on Monday before the system went down. I spoke to some larger regional banks who got around 900 through.”

Monday was the first day lenders could submit applications for the second round of PPP loans after the government added another $310 billion.

According to the SBA, more than 960,000 loans totaling nearly $90 billion, and processed by nearly 5,300 lenders were approved as of last Wednesday night.

During the first round of applications, around 1.7 million loans were approved, totaling $349 billion.

“We’re a smaller bank so in the first round, we had 53 applications approved, totaling $3.5 million and impacting 458 employees,” Zurn said. “Our average loan has been about $50,000.”

That comes to 8.64 employees per business approved for a loan through JTNB.

Loan sizes for the second round nationwide are averaging about $95,000, compared to $206,000 for the first round.

Almost 30 percent of second round funds had been distributed as of 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

“When the system has been working, we’ve been getting approvals the same day and these businesses have been settling either later that day or they come in the next morning,” Zurn said. “It’s been a very quick turnaround.”

The loans are aimed at helping small businesses to pay their employees during the COVID-19 crisis. Loan amounts are forgiven as long as the money is used to cover payroll costs, and most mortgage interest, rent, and utility costs over the eight-week period after the loan is made; and employee and compensation levels are maintained.

Zurn said a wide variety of businesses have applied for the loans.

“We’ve had a lot of contractors, and we’ve also seen dentist offices, eye doctors, pharmacies, health care providers and restaurants,” he said. “We’ve been doing the applications for our customers, but we’ve also been taking many noncustomers as well because they can’t get in with the bigger banks.”

The original round of funding was gone in less than two weeks. Though JTNB was able to get 53 applications through in the first round, it had many more in the pipeline.

“We’ve got another 60 or so applications here for this second round totaling around $3 million and impacting 435 employees,” Zurn said.

“We’ve been getting approvals the same day and these businesses have been settling either later that day or they come in the next morning,” Zurn said. “It’s been a very quick turnaround.”