SPARK 8.0.1 Release Notes

The SPARK 8.0.1 release is planned for Saturday, April 27th. This update includes improvements to E-Tran Submission and Secondary Market Sales. The maintenance window will occur from 11:00 PM CT on Saturday, April 27th through 9:00 AM CT on Sunday, April 28th.

Please note: We will not hold a webinar for this release.

What's New

Secondary Market Sales Reporting 

• Wire Received Date is a new field available as part of Settle Transaction / Settle Pending Sale / Update Settled Loan. 

• Projected Premium is a new field available when editing a package if the loan can be sold on the secondary market. 

• Projected Fully Funded Date is a new field available when editing a package if the loan requires multiple disbursements. 

• The new fields Wire Received Date, Projected Fully Funded Date, and Projected Premium are available in the Reporting API. 

What's Changed

E-Tran Compliance Updates

SPARK E-Tran submissions now align with the latest E-Tran schema, reflecting the relevant updates from the 1919 forms.

• Added logic to the Entity Owner History form to address specific questions:

  • Has the business or any affiliated business ever obtained a direct or guaranteed loan from SBA or another Federal agency loan program?

    • If Yes, Is any of the financing currently delinquent?

    • If Yes, Please provide a written explanation of the loan(s) in question.

    • If Yes, the business history status is Review.

  • Is this business an owner of any other business?

    • If Yes, please list all businesses, tax IDs, and ownership percentages.

  • Is the Applicant or any Associate presently incarcerated, on probation, on parole, or subject to an indictment for a felony or financial misconduct?

    • If Yes, please provide details.

    • If Yes, the business history status is Ineligible.

• Pending Lawsuits question update:

  • The question ‘Is the Applicant presently involved in any pending lawsuits?’ has been removed from all history forms.

  • Instead, the question ‘Is the Applicant, any owner, or any affiliated business presently involved in any legal action (including divorce)?’ will now be sent to E-Tran. This question is present on all History Forms.

Updates to E-Tran Submission

We have made some visual and functional updates to the E-Tran submission flow.

This includes the following improvements:

• Users can now select which principals to include in the SBA submission. At least 51% ownership must be included.

• Users can now designate controlling interest in scenarios where controlling interest cannot be determined.

  • Owners who have more than 50% ownership will have controlling interest by default.

  • If no owner has more than 50% ownership, all 20% or more owners must have controlling interest.

  • If no owners have 20% or more ownership, the lender must designate who has controlling interest.

• The validation summary before submitting to E-Tran will automatically refresh every 30 seconds to ensure the list of errors remains current. Additionally, users have the option to manually refresh the page.

Updates to Edit Package

We have made some visual and functional updates to the Edit Package page. The field groupings have been reorganized, and several fields appear as read-only with the option to edit in a side panel.

Default for "Can this loan be sold on the secondary market?"

A new product setting has been introduced to control the default value for "Can this loan be sold on the secondary market?". Please contact your Customer Success Manager if you are originating loan products that will never be sold on the secondary market and you'd like this value to default to "No" going forward.

Unsold Loans in Secondary Market Sales

The behavior for the ‘Unsold Loans’ tab in Secondary Market Sales has been updated. It now only shows loans that have a Secondary Market Sales status of Unsold. Before this change, SBA loans that were never intended to be sold on the secondary market would show up in this list.

Auto-created Document Placeholders in Funding and Funded Master Stages 

Document placeholders will now sync in the Funding and Funded Master Stages, enabling them to be automatically created within those stages. Previously, this functionality was limited to the Closing stage or earlier.

What's Been Fixed

• Error Generating SBA Closing Forms with entity owners - A hotfix was deployed to resolve an issue related to the generation of certain SBA closing forms. This error would only occur when a business was an owner of a business borrower.

• Error Creating a Package - A hotfix was deployed to resolve an issue creating a new package. If only a subset of the financial analyses were selected, an error would occur.

• Error Adding a Lease Agreement Document - A hotfix was deployed to resolve an issue of adding a lease agreement document placeholder in the Lease Analysis page when the underlying product did not support the document placeholder.

• Error Creating Industry Analysis - A hotfix was deployed to address an issue where an Industry Analysis could not be created when multiple businesses shared the same NAICS code.

• Ownership Percentage not allowing 2 decimal places - A hotfix was deployed to address an issue with the new ownership table not allowing 2 decimal places in the ownership percentage.

• Note Created Webhook Event - A hotfix was deployed to resolve an issue where SPARK's "Note Created" webhook event was not getting fired.

• Debt Schedule Excel document generation - A hotfix was deployed to fix an issue where the Excel debt schedule document was not being generated properly.

• Consolidated Analysis - A hotfix was deployed to address an issue with viewing a consolidated analysis in a credit memo when the consolidated analysis did not include all three variations of DSC.

• Stressed Analysis displaying for customers who have it hidden by default - A hotfix was deployed to honor the global stressed analysis visibility settings so that new financial analyses would hide the stressed analysis by default.

• Retiring a user with an empty email address - An error would occur when attempting to retire a user who has an empty email address.

Find Out More

Stay tuned for the latest features and subscribe to your favorite categories. You can view our product roadmap at any time here.

If you have any feedback or questions about this release, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email us at support@lendwithspark.com. Your feedback will help us make SPARK the best loan origination software in the market!