Eastern Bank is tops in Bay State for SBA loans

Eastern Bank said it has been ranked as the top Small Business Administration lender for Massachusetts for the second straight year.

Boston-based Eastern Bank said it made 320 SBA loans in Massachusetts totaling more than $17 million for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

According to the Small Business Administration, Eastern Bank’s Massachusetts loans created 414 jobs and helped retain 1,392, Eastern’s news release said.

Eastern Bank said it also ranked first in the number of SBA loans originated in New England.

“Eastern Bank is proud to lead Massachusetts and all of New England in lending to small businesses, which create jobs and propel economic growth,’’ Richard E. Holbrook, Eastern Bank’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Eastern Bank is the largest independent and mutually owned bank in Massachusetts, with almost $7 billion in assets and more than 80 branches from the Merrimack Valley to Cape Cod.

Citizens Bank, which until recently had been the number one SBA lender, remained a distant second, with 120 loans worth $7.8 million.

In terms of the number of SBA loans, Sovereign was third with 69, Middlesex Savings was fourth with 67, and TD Bank was fifth with 56. Bank of America, the state’s largest retail bank, issued just six SBA loans.

SBA loans, which are subsidized by the federal government, account for only a small percentage of small-business lending.

But most large national banks do not typically report the overall amount of small-business loans they issue in each state, making the overall breakdown more difficult to track.

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