Glades Bank and Trust: A $45M Filing for the County the Banks Left Behind

The five banks still headquartered in Broward County hold 2.4% of its deposits. The other 97.6% of a $69.7 billion market answers to boardrooms in Charlotte, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.

Into that vacuum, on June 2, 2026, a group led by former Amerant executive Howard Levine filed an FDIC application for Glades Bank and Trust, a proposed new bank headquartered in Plantation. The filing itself is one sentence on the FDIC's pending list. The market it targets took two decades to hollow out.

The filing: $45 million and a head start

The FDIC received the Glades application on June 2; it is pending, and the organizers are reportedly raising $45 million. For scale, that is more than the $38 million Locality Bank raised to open in Fort Lauderdale in 2022, and well above the roughly $30 million behind Evermore Bank the same year.

One detail suggests this has been in motion far longer than the filing date implies: gladesbank.com was registered on October 9, 2025, eight months before the application landed. Whatever Glades is building, it was not rushed.

The domain was registered eight months before the FDIC filing. Whatever Glades is building, it was not rushed.

Levine's own framing, from his LinkedIn announcement: a bank "built on relationships" for "founders, business owners, professionals, and growing companies," where a business owner "can easily reach someone who knows their name, understands their business, and is genuinely invested in their success."

The people: the executive who digitized Florida's largest community bank

Levine is not a first-time operator testing a thesis. He spent four years in the executive suite of Amerant Bank, the $9.9 billion Coral Gables institution that calls itself the largest community bank headquartered in Florida. He arrived in 2021 as chief revenue officer of Amerant Mortgage, was named head of consumer banking in 2022 with Private Client, Wealth, Mortgage, Business Banking, and Retail under him, and rose to senior EVP and chief consumer banking officer before stepping down in February 2025.

The relevant part of that tenure is what happened to Amerant's consumer business while he ran it. The bank executed a digital transformation that made it a 2023 Banking Tech Awards USA finalist, partnering with Alloy for identity and onboarding, Numerated for digital business lending, Marstone for digital wealth, and Q2's ClickSWITCH for deposit acquisition. Levine has seen what a modern consumer banking stack looks like from the inside, at scale, in this exact market.

His co-organizers, per The Bank Slate, are executives from Exuma Capital Partners, a private equity firm founded in 2022 by Air Pros USA founder Anthony Perera. Exuma's headquarters sit in Plantation, the same city as the proposed bank. A hometown bank organized by people whose firm is already headquartered in that hometown is exactly how this is supposed to work.

The market: the county the banks left behind

Broward County is Florida's second most populous county: 1.99 million people, a $136.6 billion economy, 81,809 business establishments, and a small business base of 58,510 employer firms plus another 336,055 nonemployer businesses.

Here is who banks it. Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Truist hold 64% of the county's $69.7 billion in deposits. The five banks still headquartered in the county, two of which are Canadian-owned retail outposts, hold $1.7 billion combined.

Seventeen Broward-headquartered banks have disappeared since 2008. The most recent was the most symbolic: American National Bank of Oakland Park, family-owned for 38 years and often called Broward's oldest community bank, sold to Georgia's United Community Banks for roughly $80 million in May 2025.

The counter-evidence that local demand survived the consolidation: Locality Bank, the county's first new bank since 2009, opened in January 2022 and passed $300 million in assets within three years. The market did not stop wanting a hometown bank. It just stopped having ones to choose from.

The gauntlet: a Florida wave meets a friendlier FDIC

Glades is filing into the strongest de novo environment in years, and the epicenter is its home state. Five of the fifteen deposit insurance applications filed nationally in 2026 through early July are Florida banks: New South Bank in Tampa, Tidestone Bank and Florida Bank of Finance in Coral Gables, Portrait Bank in Winter Park (chartered June 29), and Glades. Add BankMiami's March 2025 opening and Echelon Bank's April 2026 opening in Clearwater, and Florida is producing new banks faster than any state in the country.

The regulatory weather helps. FDIC Chairman Travis Hill has called the post-2010 formation drought, roughly 86 new banks in 15 years against 412 in 1984 alone, a problem to fix, and has proposed easing capital expectations for noncomplex community banks. In June, the FFIEC issued a joint statement explicitly supporting new bank formation.

None of that softens the standard that follows approval: three years of enhanced supervision, an 8% minimum Tier 1 leverage ratio, dividend restrictions, and a first examination that tests whether the programs described in the business plan actually exist. For a bank whose stated market is founders and growing companies, the BSA and fraud program examiners will want to see is not a generic one. Business banking means entity documents, beneficial ownership, and owners whose income rarely fits on a pay stub.

The stack: an early signal most de novos never send

Most bank organizing groups say nothing about technology until after approval. Levine has already named a core: he noted on LinkedIn that Glades is partnering with CSI, the community bank core processor, as the institution takes shape.

That is an unusually early commitment, and a revealing one. Choosing the core first is the conventional sequence; the decisions that follow it are the ones that will define how Glades actually feels to the founders and business owners it wants. Account opening, identity verification, income and employment data, fraud screening: the layer between the borrower and the core is where a 2026 de novo can be genuinely better than the incumbents, because it gets to start source-verified instead of retrofitting verification onto document-based intake the way every 20-year-old bank must.

Levine has already run that playbook once, wiring Alloy, Numerated, and Marstone into a $10 billion balance sheet. The interesting question for Glades is what the equivalent stack looks like when you get to design it before day one, for a county with 336,000 nonemployer businesses whose owners do not have W-2s.

Broward has been exporting its banks for twenty years. A $45 million filing organized by the executive who digitized Florida's largest community bank, backed by a PE firm headquartered in the same city, is the most credible attempt yet to reverse the flow.