BANKING TECH AWARDS USA 2023 FINALIST: Amerant Bank - Amerant Bank's Digital Transformation

With the incorporation of Numerated's platform, Amerant Bank can significantly reduce the time to process and fund business loans for its customers, allowing businesses a fully automated lending process for loans, and making the digital borrowing experience easier, fueling segment growth. Just after partnering with Numerated, Amerant announced another fintech partnership, this time enhancing its digital wealth management solutions. Marstone, a leading digital wealth management platform with a mission to improve financial literacy, deepen financial inclusion, and humanize finance for all, partnered with Amerant to bolster its wealth management services. With this new implementation, the Bank can help empower customers to fully understand their financial position, plans, and outlook while benefiting from high-touch relationship management, which is expected to improve banking relationships further.

Jerry Plush and Amerant have been so dedicated to Marstone's technology, the Bank has since become an equity investor in the company, and Plush has been named to its board of directors. This technology has led to the launch of one of the Bank's newest products – Amerant Smart Investing. Amerant Smart Investing brings yet another dimension to the Bank's commitment to fintech, this time affording its clients a tool to help find success in wealth management. With Smart Investing, customers can get a personalized investment experience that can begin with as little as $5,000. Portfolios can be designed using a digital questionnaire that measures financial habits and beliefs, providing personalized investment recommendations tailor-made to each customer. To enhance its digital offerings even further, Amerant announced the use of two more fintechs, Alloy and Q2 ClickSWITCH, two platforms designed to make opening new accounts and switching direct deposits and automatic payments a faster, safer and more efficient process. Both partners provide a seamless customer experience, reducing bank employees' burden of having to review paper onboarding documentation. Integrating onboarding processes provides Amerant Bank access to algorithms and data source products to create an automated process built to scale with demand.

Amerant has had loads of activity in fintech partnerships and acquisitions. To spearhead its initiatives, Amerant incorporated a new wholly-owned subsidiary, Amerant SPV, to invest and acquire non-controlling interests in companies, including fintech and specialty finance companies. Since it was incorporated, Amerant SPV has been active, investing in the aforementioned Marstone and Raistone, a financial technology solutions provider launched in 2017 that offers seamless financing solutions to unlock working capital. It continues; Amerant also has invested in JAM FINTOP Blockchain Investment Fund, which focuses on creating an infrastructure that will help regulated financial institutions compliantly operate blockchain-powered applications in areas such as lending, payments and exchanges.

Amerant believes blockchain will eventually become the dominant operating infrastructure of the financial system and sees immense potential in this transformational technology. These investments have kickstarted Amerant's goal of creating an all-encompassing digital banking ecosystem of platforms for their customers, the likes of which we've yet to see in other community banks. Amerant's vision to provide the latest in technological offerings – bringing them at par with much larger institutions – all while maintaining its 40+-year commitment to personalized service, is positioning the organization for exponential success. In its Q4 3 of 3 2022 Earnings Report, Amerant reported an increase in total assets, gross loans, and deposits. The Bank has no doubts that its expanded fintech offerings helped realize positive results, with additional fintech offerings to come.