Sunwest Bank secures multi-year partnership with CRE FinTech Blooma

By Edlyn Cardoza

Recently, Sunwest Bank announced the renewal of its partnership with new FinTech, Blooma, as part of a larger digital transformation initiative. The multi-year contract represents a long-term relationship between the two entities that began in 2021 with the introduction of Blooma to help automate and streamline the bank’s portfolio management processes for its commercial real estate division.

Sunwest, which serves the western United States and has over $2 billion in assets, is known for its aggressive stance on technology adoption under the helm of President Carson Lappetito. Under his leadership, the bank has embarked on a comprehensive plan to overhaul and optimize internal processes in the name of superior customer experience. A task that has been carried out in collaboration with key players in the banking technology area – most recently, with Blooma.

“At Sunwest Bank, our vision and focus on digitalisation, process improvement and improving our customer experience is of utmost importance. This is achieved through build-versus-buy analysis, selection and integration of the best and most innovative technology solutions to deliver real value to our users and customers. As such, Sunwest Bank is pleased to partner with Blooma.ai to integrate and leverage their platform into our CRE processes and workflows to accelerate our underwriting processes and expedite loan decisions for our clients,” says Matthew March, Chief Information Officer for Sunwest Bank.

Blooma is an online platform designed for the CRE segment. It offers a centralized, fully digital CRE solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate the underwriting process and allows CRE professionals to evaluate (and close) more deals in less time. The platform includes two core use cases – a CRE origination intelligence suite that optimizes the deal evaluation process and a CRE portfolio intelligence platform that drives continuous monitoring efficiency and reduced credit risk.

Today, Sunwest is leveraging the platform’s monitoring capabilities to consolidate and digitize its entire CRE portfolio, and plans to expand its use to pre-flight in the coming months. Most importantly, the Blooma platform aims to solve the more significant connectivity problem for banks with its flexible architecture that provides easy implementation and seamless integration with existing tools, a key feature of Sunwest’s growing technology stack. Together, Blooma and Sunwest management are working to curate a technology stack as part of a frictionless experience for their CRE team.