Amerant Bancorp Inc. (AMTB) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

Amerant Bancorp is a commercial bank holding company with roughly $10 billion of assets, built on a South Florida deposit franchise (Amerant Bank, formerly Mercantil Bank) with additional lending in Houston, Dallas and New York. It earns most of its money from the spread between interest on loans and securities and the cost of deposits (about $361 million of net interest income in 2025) plus about $79 million of fees and other income. How we measured earnings. We started from cash generated by operations and removed timing swings, including mortgage loans originated for sale and changes in accrued interest and other balances. We subtracted stock compensation and the part of capital spending needed just to keep branches and systems running. For a bank we also treated credit costs (the annual provision for loan losses, plus losses booked on loans moved to held-for-sale) as a real, recurring cost rather than a non-cash add-back, because loans that do not get repaid are a permanent loss. Net charge-offs of $44.5 million in 2025 (0.63% of loans, versus 0.99% in 2024) are consistent with this treatment. On that basis, earnings per share were about $0.95 (2016), $1.45, $1.34, $1.14, negative $0.61 (2020, pandemic reserve build), $1.55, $1.72, negative $0.17 (2023, heavy loan-sale losses), $0.94 and $1.08 (2025). We used 2021 to 2025, the period under the current management and strategy (sale of the headquarters building, Houston branch sale, mortgage-for-sale program, credit clean-up), which contains both reserve-release years and two stressed years; the median is about $1.08 per share. We did not lift this level for the stronger first-half 2026 net income (about $38.9 million), since it is only two quarters and helped by lower provisions. In the other direction, first-half 2026 net interest income of $162.9 million was about 8% below the same period of 2025, which is a caution but not yet enough to lower the level. Growth check. Owner earnings rose about 15% in 2025 versus 2024. We did not assume any growth in any case. Loan growth, fee expansion, margin recovery and buybacks are not contracted or a long-proven pattern here, and 2024 also included a $77 million securities repositioning loss that we treated as a one-time restructuring and did not charge against earnings. Bear case (about $10 per share). Credit stress recurs at the pace this bank has already shown: two years of the last six (2020 and 2023) were loss years for owner earnings. Combined with the roughly 8% year-on-year drop in first-half 2026 net interest income, we assume earnings settle near $0.60 per share and stay there. Higher leverage in a real-estate downturn, and large commercial real estate exposure in Florida, are the named risks. Base case (about $18 per share). Earnings hold at about $1.08 per share indefinitely, with no growth credited. What persists is the deposit franchise and lending book, which have produced positive owner earnings in eight of the last ten years and have not required a going-concern-type rescue. Bull case (about $26 per share). Credit costs stay at the benign levels seen in 2017-2019 and 2021-2022, when earnings ran about $1.14 to $1.72 per share, and we assume about $1.60 per share is sustained. This uses only the bank's own demonstrated results, not a rate or market recovery. What would make this wrong. If charge-offs stay near 0.6% of loans and fee income rises, the base is too low; a repeat of 2023-style loan-sale losses, or further declines in net interest income, would put the shares closer to the bear case. We could not reconcile the sharp swings in operating cash flow from mortgage loans held for sale to a repeatable run rate, so those flows were removed. Our base case values the shares at about $18, and the margin-of-safety price is near $9.50, given the credit-cycle exposure and the fact that a flat base leaves no cushion for a repeat of stressed years.