Working with $11.9 million from its shareholders to continue growing and investing in technology this year, Banesco USA entered into an agreement recently with Silicon Valley-based accelerator Plug and Play Fintech.

The Coral Gables, Fla.-based bank may be a community bank, but it’s thinking big when it comes to digital transformation. President and CEO Jorge Salas said the bank can do no less, considering the changes in how people consume financial services and what they expect from financial institutions.

“We believe we have to focus our energy on choosing the right partners and making sure that the frame of mind and the culture is one where everyone realizes that this rollercoaster that has been going uphill for 200 years is about to do some twists and turns,” he told Bank Innovation. “We have to be prepared for it and take good care of our clients, focusing basically on good advisory and not so much on the technology.”

It’s no longer a question of whether to partner with fintechs or not, but who the bank is going to partner with and on what terms, Salas said.

Banesco USA has already upgraded its online and mobile banking capabilities with digital banking software provider Q2 and its credit workflow with cloud banking service provider nCino, which Salas said has cut the bank’s loan processing time in half. He said the bank is also close to signing an agreement with an artificial intelligence fintech specializing in BSA/AML compliance.

Gustavo Rengifo, VP, Head of Customer Experience for Banesco USA, told Bank Innovation that the bank, before signing with Plug and Play, spent time in Silicon Valley meeting with accelerators and incubators to make sure it found a partner with access to quality startups across a variety of verticals. He said the ability for startups to quickly integrate and go to market was key for the bank.

“Last time we were there, we saw 17 companies in a Shark Tank type of setting, but they were all in one dimension,” Salas added. “We’re going to keep going and see different fintechs that are in different spaces.”

Other banks partnered with Plug and Play include MUFG, Ally, BNP Paribas, Bank of the West, U.S. Bank, and Citizens Bank, according to the accelerator’s website.

Salas said letting the fintechs deal with the technological aspects of digital transformation allows the bank to focus on how those changes can help it better serve the customer.

“If we are focused on that constant improvement of the experience, we believe that that’s the way to go,” he said. “And it’s possible.”

For instance, he said Banesco USA is considering a partnership with experience management company Qualtrics, which was sold to SAP for $8 billion last year, to help the bank gain actionable insights into customers’ and employees’ happiness with the bank at points in time. He said the AI-powered platform, among other things, would allow branch managers to see how many times customers interact with the bank through different channels, who they speak with, how long they interact with the bank to perform certain tasks and their reported levels of satisfaction with certain services and with the bank overall.

“We do believe that digital transformation is about culture, more than anything else,” Salas said. “It’s a frame of mind. It’s just thinking that whatever you do, if it can be done digitally and better, for the clients and employees, then you are being effective at your digital transformation.”

Salas said Banesco USA received an influx of capital from shareholders because the bank is growing faster than the market.

“We’ve found the shareholders are willing to fuel growth and they trust our strategy,” he said. “We compete directly with other community banks here and, in our market, either you invest, or, basically, you sell. We are in investment and growth mode.”

Driving the bank’s growth in 2018 were $131 million in mostly commercial loans, increasing the bank’s total loans by 16%.

Salas said community banks need to focus on loans between $300,000 and $30 million because those loans are typically too big for computers to decide and too small for big banks to give the personal service that community banks can. He said technology has helped the large tech companies and big banks make their services more personalized, but not necessarily more personal.

“It seems subtle, but it’s very important,” Salas said. “If you can talk to your banker directly through an ATM, for instance, then that’s using technology to be more personal. So we’re looking for those technologies that we can apply everywhere, in the things we do, to make services more personal, not just personalized.”