Community banks led the charge through the origination process of the Paycheck Protection Program, answering the call of many small businesses shut out from larger financial institutions. According to Small Business Administration data, lenders with less than $50 billion in assets processed 64% of the $510 billion PPP loans approved through May 30.

As the forgiveness calculation deadline nears, community banks are using auditing tools and online portals to brace for what some expect to be an even rockier process. Though, as regulations continue to change, tech providers with PPP forgiveness solutions will need to ensure their systems —built to follow one set of guidelines — are flexible enough to adhere to new regulatory changes, two of which were announced this week.

“It’s the never-ending cycle,” said Pam Perdue, executive vice president and chief regulatory officer at regtech firm Continuity. “In general, the financial institutions are struggling because the onus in all of this is on the borrower, and the average small business borrower is not sophisticated in these matters,” she said. Many small banks have adopted technology to assist PPP borrowers through the process, though “each time one of these things changes, not only does the software associated with it have to change, but both bankers and borrowers have to decide if they’re still willing to use whatever methods were there in the first place.”

Carter Bank and Trust, which has $4 billion in assets, is working with Fiserv to facilitate the forgiveness calculation process, according to Matt Speare, chief information officer at the bank. Fiserv helped the Martinsville, Va.-based bank through the origination process with an online portal that collected documents, e-signatures and provided a platform for communication. With banks gearing up for forgiveness, the tech provider enhanced its portal with increased personalization and auditing capabilities.

“Within the portal itself, I can send them an email that gives them the specific instructions and it comes from me, the banker, so they know it’s not just a generic message coming out and it allows us to status those all the way through the process and ultimately submit those for forgiveness to the SBA,” Speare said. “At some point our primary regulator, when they’re doing their inspections, they’re going to want to see what we did and [the platform] will give us a complete audit trail with all the supporting documents.”

Carter Bank has funded 900 PPP loans worth $60 million. With about 150 applications awaiting SBA approval, the bank will begin to phase out of the origination process to focus on forgiveness and loan servicing, which Speare expects to be more resource-intensive than the application process.

“The loan forgiveness side is complex in comparison, so I think our customers are going to have an issue and I think we’re going to have to do a lot of hand holding along the way,” he said, noting that about 40% of SMB owners struggled to upload loan application documents online. The bank is staffing up its PPP customer service teams to handle the anticipated wave of questions.

Also read: M&T preps for PPP forgiveness with Blend

The Illinois-based State Bank of Geneva, with $80 million in assets, is accepting PPP applications and facilitating forgiveness calculations via an online portal using technology from FIS, the financial software company that operates the bank’s core technology.

“Looking at the initial regulations, we looked at it and said this is going to be impossible, we need to have a partner,” said CEO Rick Razum, adding the bank opened its books to new customers as well as existing ones. “We had a couple people who applied at other banks because they didn’t think a little bank like us could get it done,” he said, but the bank managed to process loans quickly and fund applications in as little as one hour in some cases. So far, the bank has funded 85 PPP loans and still receives about three applications per week.

FIS has reworked “Numerated,” its existing SBA commercial loan platform integrated with E-Tran, to fit with the PPP application process, and streamlined the implementation time from months to weeks, according to Rob Lee, head of digital and banking at FIS. More than 60 financial institutions have onboarded to FIS’ platform and the company has focused on community banks, since many of the larger institutions already had processes in place, he said.

The biggest challenge for FIS will be updating the workflow-enabled solution to reflect the changing guidelines around PPP forgiveness, Lee said.

Yesterday the U.S. Senate passed the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act, the most recent update to PPP guidelines in a string of changes enacted throughout the application and forgiveness process, according to Continuity’s Perdue. The measure now sits on the president’s desk, awaiting sign-off.

The Flexibility Act extends the time and flexibility business owners have to use their PPP loans to qualify for forgiveness. The act comes days after the U.S. Treasury and SBA had issued an interim rule on Monday tweaking the regulations impacting the forgiveness calculation.

Perdue noted that the continually updated regulations around loan forgiveness have led to confusion for borrowers and institutions, saying the government “has provided so many alternatives for how to calculate, that even that has stymied people. And they’ve given [banks] safe harbor saying, ‘You don’t have to worry about it banker,’ but at the end of the day, that remains to be seen until banks start getting reimbursed by the Treasury for some of these loans.”