Looking Back, June

1998: The SBA's Commercial Loan Servicing Centers
Aided by feedback and cooperation from NAGGL, the SBA established its first Commercial Loan Servicing Center (CLSC) in Fresno, CA as a pilot in 1988.

Since then, the quality of the Agency's portfolio and the efficiency of its workflow have grown tremendously, accounting for an increasingly stable 7(a) program. A few facts about the center since its 1988 inception:

• The center, modeled after the successful Home Loan Servicing Centers that had been operating since the early 1980's, was initially responsible for handling loan servicing activities for all disaster and regular business loans in California.
  
  
• Centralization of loan servicing has proven efficient because of increased automation, specialization of activities, and economies of scale which permit necessary loan servicing activities to be performed by fewer staff than are needed in district offices.

Starting in 1994, the SBA expanded its Fresno CLSC to handle loan servicing activities for most of the western U.S. In 1995, the Agency opened a center in Little Rock to handle business loans in the eastern part of the country. The two centers now service all of the SBA's commercial loan portfolio. These two centers handle the servicing requests for over 200,000 loans.