National Australia Bank is offering up to A$56 billion in potential loans to small to medium business with the introduction of what it calls an Enhanced Lending Application tool to "pre-assess" more than 93,000 business customers. ELA will be rolled out to eligible NAB Business customers by the end of May and will be adopted by all business and private bankers by the end of the year, according to a NAB media release.Customers can apply for up to $2 million via ELA, making this the biggest offering of its kind on the market, according to Angela Mentis, NAB's chief customer officer for business and private banking.Mentis made the announcement yesterday at the Australian Financial Review's Banking and Wealth Summit, where she said the introduction of ELA would not only offer invaluable support for many business customers, but had the potential to provide a substantial positive kickback to the economy."This is not just good for business, it is good for the economy and good for Australia," Mentis said.The ELA application builds on another project for NAB's business customers: last year NAB launched Quick Biz which provides small businesses with an unsecured loan of up to $50,000 via a digital application providing instant conditional credit decisions, with approved funds landing in accounts within one business day.Mentis, who claimed NAB "continued to do more for the SME sector than any other bank in the country," also noted that 69 per cent of Australian SMEs still cited dealing with red tape as "taking a lot of effort despite all the noise we've made about the need to remove it."All that compliance effort comes at considerable cost to a small business owner, and even working out if you meet that criteria can be a challenge with all the conflicting definitions: "The Australian Bureau of Statistics describe a small business as fewer than 20 employees, Fair Work Australia say it is less than 15, while the ATO defines it as less than $2 million turnover," Mentis said. "Depending on which bank you're working with, there will be a range of different turn over thresholds that define whether you're a small, medium or large business," she said.NAB is also giving its small business contracts a complete overhaul to make them far simpler for business owners, targeting "standard, plain English contracts, in market by the end of the year"."But there is much more we need to do as a nation, and as a finance industry, to unlock the prize," said Mentis.  She gave as examples new asset classes that could be created using areas of Australian expertise in financial services and industry sectors such as agriculture.