Strategic planning

Florida-based Amerant Bancorp recently restructured its securities portfolio after selling its Houston branches.

The Florida company completed its purchase of Independent Bank, increasing its liability sensitivity and jumping to $65 billion in assets.

The Honolulu-based utility sold a 90.1% stake in American Savings Bank. The deal valued the lender at $450 million.

Transactions grew larger and more frequent this year. As a result, aggregate value more than tripled from 2023 and topped $15 billion.

The Pennsylvania-based buyer said it would pick up nearly $350 million of assets and a commercial-focused loan portfolio as part of the $54.6 million deal.

The Federal Reserve and OCC approved the company's plan to buy Independent Bank Group in Texas, putting the deal on track to close early next year as expected. In an atmosphere of M&A delays for banks, the deal is on a relatively smooth path.

The combination would create a Northeast regional bank with nearly $24 billion of assets. It would rank as the eighth-largest bank in the Boston metropolitan area by deposit market share.

The Long Island bank is the latest financial institution to use new equity to restructure its balance sheet and unload low-yielding assets. Its stock price tumbled after the shares were priced at a considerable discount.

The bank said it redeployed proceeds from the sale into high-yielding investments. It also said it would end an employee pension plan to curb expenses.

The Dallas bank has spent the last three years building itself into a new company. Now, it has to prove the investments will pay off.

The Canadian bank's stateside retail operations will be hamstrung by a massive anti-money-laundering settlement. But executives said the company can lean on both its Wall Street business and lines of revenue north of the border.

After the bank's 2014 spinoff from Royal Bank of Scotland, its executives worked to shore up weaknesses. Now they're concentrating on how to close the gap with regional banking peers.

Executives at the super-regional bank told investors that years of investments are poised to start paying off in rising profits, but the market seemed skeptical about the company's plan forward.

Profits at Cleveland-based KeyCorp have suffered due to bonds it bought when interest rates were low. But a recent investment by Canada's Scotiabank gave Key more wiggle room — an early benefit of a deal that both companies hope to build on.

The Dallas company, which has been in transformation mode for three years, recently took a series of actions to try to meet the profitability targets it set for itself.

The third-largest Canadian bank's proposed minority stake in KeyCorp is an unconventional way to generate more U.S. revenue. Analysts say it's a less risky approach than buying an American bank outright.

Industry Bancshares got into a deep hole after rising interest rates tanked the value of its sizable bond portfolio. Now the Texas community bank is expecting a $195 million capital infusion and taking steps to start relying more on revenue from loans.

Though it hasn't set a timeline, Oxford Bank, based north of the Motor City, is weighing a southward expansion that would add all the Detroit metropolitan area to its footprint.

The embattled Long Island-based bank announced the hiring of nine new senior executives. Most of them have ties to CEO Joseph Otting, who previously held the top job at the OCC and OneWest Bank.

When the superregional bank sold its insurance business for $10.1 billion, it laid out three ways to use the proceeds: buybacks, a balance sheet repositioning and loan growth. The latter plan is so far proving to be elusive.