Sunwest Bank secures multiyear partnership with CRE FinTech Blooma

By Edlyn Cardoza

Recently, Sunwest Bank announced the renewal of its partnership with emergent FinTech, Blooma as part of a larger digital transformation initiative. The multiyear contract represents a longstanding relationship between the two entities that began in 2021 with the adoption of Blooma to help automate and streamline the bank’s portfolio management processes for its commercial real estate arm.

Sunwest, which serves the Western United States and has over $2 billion in assets, is well known for its aggressive stance on tech adoption at the helm of President Carson Lappetito. Under his leadership, the bank has kicked off a comprehensive plan to overhaul and optimise internal processes in the name of superior client experience. A task that has been accomplished in partnership with key players in the banking technology space – most recently, with Blooma.

“At Sunwest Bank, our vision and focus on digitization, process improvement, and enhancing our customer experience, is of paramount importance. This is achieved through build-versus-buy analysis, selecting, and integrating 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 lending decisions to our customers,” says Matthew March, Chief Information Officer for Sunwest Bank.

Blooma is a web-based platform purposely designed for the CRE segment. It offers a centralised, 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 optimises the deal evaluation process and a CRE portfolio intelligence platform that drives ongoing monitoring efficiencies and reduced credit risk.

Today, Sunwest is leveraging the platform’s monitoring capabilities to consolidate and digitise 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 issue for banks with its flexible architecture that makes for a light implementation and seamless integration with existing tools, a key feature for Sunwest’s growing technology stack. Together, the leadership at Blooma and Sunwest are working on curating a tech stack as part of a frictionless experience for their CRE team.