Florida Banking August 2022

W hile Locality Bank is not a digital bank, its three cofounders took a “digital first” approach to combine the great technology and user experience of fintechs with the best of community banking — the relationship orientation, local ownership and decision making. The Fort Lauderdale-based de novo chose to move away from the legacy core and start fresh by building a more modern system from the ground up. “We recognized that we had to do this differently than we did at First Green Bank or Broward Bank of Commerce,” said CEO Keith Costello, referencing his former banks. “The main driver of that difference was technology. We asked ourselves, where is banking going to be five years from now? Let’s design our bank to be there in the future. Wayne Gretsky said, ‘skate

Locality Bank’s digital-first approach attracted eager investors; the team initially planned to raise $23 million in capital and surpassed that goal to reach $38 million. “We were inundated with requests from people who wanted to invest, which is unusual. The response from the community has been overwhelming,”Costello said. The Locality Bank team leverages social media to spread the word about the bank. Costello was an early adopter of networking platform LinkedIn; today he has over 30,000 followers. According to Independent Banker magazine, Costello is one of the top social media bankers in the country. Both Saito and LeBlanc are active on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well. “We never have to explain to anyone who we are, because they already know,” Saito said. “We’re posting

where the puck is going,’ and we try to run a business that way.” Costello joined forces with former colleague Drew Saito, now chief lending officer, and Corey LeBlanc, COO/CTO, to start the bank. LeBlanc brought the digital technology expertise, suggest ing cloud-based digital banking platform Nymbus. The platform’s open API architecture gives the bank more flexibility when it comes to integrating fintechs and other systems. “We didn’t want to take

pictures of ourselves with investors, with our clients, with business owners… our content and messaging is very authentic.” In fact, Costello connected wi th LeBlanc through LinkedIn. They hit it off; even so, both Costello and Saito were shocked when LeBlanc left his home state of Louisiana — and the bank he’d worked at for 14 years — to join their startup. Costello credits LeBlanc with crafting the technology port ion of the bank’s

“WE FELT IT WAS VERY IMPORTANT TO START AT THE FOUNDATION, WHICH IS OUR CORE OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE TECHNOLOGY WE’RE SITTING ON.”

- DREW SAITO

an old business model and just redo it. We felt it was very important to start at the foundation, which is our core operating system and the technology we’re sitting on,” Saito said. “At the same time, we’re still rooted in relationship banking; we’re out meeting with clients all day long. We’re a community bank built on a digital-first platform.”

business plan in a way that got the regulators comfortable with their decision to use Nymbus. “The regulators wanted to know if we had the internal expertise to utilize this technology, and whether it would be safe and sound. Corey gave them confidence in his knowledge and background,

Locality Bank is the region’s first community bank to open in 10 years. In 2015, there were 11 community banks headquartered in Broward County, but only three by 2020. “During the height of the pandemic, we saw that many local companies could not get PPP funding. Why not? Because the community banks were the source for those local companies, and they were gone,”Costello said. “The saying goes, ‘If you ask a barber if you need a haircut, he’s going to say yes.’ Drew and I didn’t want to start another bank just because it’s what we thought the community needed. We looked at the data; Broward County has a GDP of $120 billion. This is not a small market.”

Preliminary concept of Locality Bank's new headquarters, expected to open in October.

Intracoastal Bank, Continued on page 10

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