Live Oak Bank is no longer participating in the federal Small Business Lending Fund, according to a document it filed Wednesday with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

The Form 8-K document stated that on Tuesday, Live Oak Bancshares – the bank’s parent – paid the U.S. Treasury $6.8 million to redeem its Small Business Lending Fund (SBLF) debt securities. That is repayment in full of what it owned the lending fund.

“This was a simple business decision,” said bank spokesman Micah Davis in an email Thursday. “We decided it was best for the company to exit the program, and so we paid back the debt.”

Established as part of the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, the SBLF was designed to “provide capital to qualified community banks and community development loan funds in order to encourage small business lending,” according to the program’s website.

The U.S. Treasury invested more than $4 billion in 332 institutions through the SBLF program, mostly to community banks, the website states, reporting that as of June 30, current and former program participants had reported an increase in small business lending of $17.2 billion since the fund’s inception.

Live Oak Bank, established in Wilmington in 2008, focuses primarily on providing SBA-guaranteed loans to businesses in targeted industries. Beginning with veterinarians, the bank has since broadened its lending panorama to include 11 industries, ranging from independent pharmacists to family entertainment centers.

In its June 30 report, the fund showed that Live Oak Bank’s lending total at that time was about $344.1 million, an increase of nearly 541 percent over the bank’s baseline lending volume of about $53.7 million. It was paying 1.5 percent on its balance.

The fund, which extended interest rates of 1 and 1.5 percent interest rates to lending institutions that made significant progress in increasing their small business lending, had planned to raise the interest rate to 9 percent in 2016, according to media reports.

A total of eight banks in North Carolina have been participating in the SBLF program, according to program reports. The only other bank in the Wilmington market that is part of the program is First Bank, headquartered in Troy, North Carolina.