WASHINGTON — Even as another major bank announced it was repaying its bailout money, President Obama yesterday told executives from the nation's largest financial institutions to return the taxpayer's largesse in an additional way — increase lending to small businesses to help the economy create more jobs.

"My main message in today's meeting was very simple: that America's banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry, and now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy," Obama said after a White House meeting yesterday that he described as "candid and productive."

That sort of pay-it-forward duty "starts with finding ways to help creditworthy small- and medium-sized businesses get the loans that they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs," the president said.

"Now, no one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place, and it's true that regulators are requiring them to hold more of their capital as a hedge against the kind of problems that we saw last year," he continued.

"But given the difficulty businesspeople are having as lending has declined, and given the exceptional assistance banks receive to get them through a difficult time, we expect them to explore every responsible way to help get our economy moving again."

Obama said the executives told them they were hiring more people to help with small business loans and raising their goals for such lending. But he said administration officials "expect some results" after hearing complaints from creditworthy small businesses that they still can't get loans.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Richard Davis, chief executive of US Bancorp, said the banks wanted to make more loans but were careful about not taking too much risk.

"Every bank in that room talked about adding many, many small business originators and setting very aggressive goals for small business lending next year," he said. "Lending is what we do and so we want to make more loans. We have to find a way to qualify more people and not put ourselves at risk three or four years from now because of actions we took at a moment in time."

The meeting came after Citigroup announced it had reached a deal with the U.S. Treasury Department to repay $20 billion in bailout money.

With many banks repaying their bailout money sooner than expected, the administration said it anticipated losses would be $200 billion less than expected. Obama wants to use some of that money to spur small business lending. It's unclear how large banks could help that effort, as most loans to small businesses come from smaller community banks.