They are veteran bankers, but not well-known banks. They have raised sizable war chests of cash to snap up the state's sickest banks at bargain prices.

These private equity and investor groups also are buying weakened banks that appear salvageable, as well as some healthy banks that need fresh money to grow.

They plan to become the new powers in Florida banking.

"It's kind of like barbarians at the gate. Would we let them in?" said Florida bank expert Ken Thomas. "Florida is now the banking private-equity capital of the United States."

Peninsula Bank of Englewood, which collapsed June 25, was acquired by Premier American Bank, the resurrected edition of a failed Miami bank. Premier is owned by Bond Street Holdings LLC, a Naples-based investor group that has now acquired three failed Florida banks -- and is ready to buy more.

Bond Street's chief executive is Dennis Healy, the former chief financial officer of North Fork Bancorp of New York.

North Fork's former CEO, John Kanas, led the private investor groups that last year bought BankUnited of Coral Gables, the state's largest bank failure.

TIB Bank of Naples is selling to North American Financial Holdings, a Charlotte, N.C., investor group headed by former Bank of America vice chairman Gene Taylor. The deal ensures TIB's survival.

Taylor's group will initially invest $175 million in TIB, using a portion of the $900 million it raised from investors. Another $175 million will be pumped in over the coming months.

Even the area's smallest banks are enticing private investors. Port Charlotte's National Bank of Southwest Florida, at $36 million in assets, is selling to a group headed by Cleveland health care executive A. Malachi Mixon III.

Thirty Florida banks have failed during the Great Recession -- 14 so far this year, matching the total for all of 2009. Seven community banks in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties have fallen. Fourteen banks remain based in the region, but failures and mergers of survival will likely eliminate some of them.

Staking their ground

Despite the battered economy, Florida and its banking industry remain enticing targets for expansion-hungry acquirers. Analysts say the banks that outlast the Great Recession will be well positioned to thrive when the economy improves.

"Florida will continue to be one of the most attractive retail banking markets in the country and will continue to grow deposits and population at a faster rate than most states," said Benjamin Bishop Jr. of Allen C. Ewing & Co., a Jacksonville-based investment bank.

Most of Florida's failed banks were taken over by established institutions. Busted banks in Southwest Florida brought in new competitors like Stearns Financial of Minnesota and IberiaBank of Louisiana.

But the private equity firms and investor groups are staking their ground.

"They all have the same goal -- get a bank footprint and then build on it," said Frank Knautz, a Sarasota-based bank consultant. "They can come in and get it shored up and running smoothly, and then start looking for who's around them to gobble up."

The buyers are paying bargain prices for banking franchises that took years and millions of dollars to build. Peninsula, for example, needed 24 years to become a 13-office, $644 million-asset bank. Premier paid nothing to assume its $580 million deposit base.

While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has long preferred selling failed banks to existing, experienced banks, the agency now allows the new private groups into the bidding. Regulators grant these groups "shelf charters," basically approved applications for new banks, that remain dormant until they swing a deal.

Thomas, who has tracked state banking for decades, wonders if the investor groups' ownerships of Florida banks will be short-lived.

"The sole focus for these private equity players is returns to their investors, with little to no concern about return to the community," he said. "Why do they need to develop good relationships with builders and developers and customers in the community if they are going to be gone in three to five years?"

So far, the buyers say they want to grow the banks they acquire. Healy, whose Premier American bought Peninsula, has said his goal "is to be the next Barnett Bank," referring to what was once Florida's top bank until its 1997 sale to Bank of America.

The FDIC deals make things easier for acquirers. The agency will share on 80 percent of losses on the $644 million in assets Premier acquired.

"The loss-share agreement almost encourages them to throw as much as they can into foreclosure," Thomas said.

One week after buying its first bank in January, the new Premier grabbed the failed Florida Community Bank of Immokalee, which had offices in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. At $875 million in assets, Florida Community more than doubled Premier's size.

And with Peninsula, Premier has become a $1.5 billion asset bank with 28 offices on both Florida coasts.

The new BankUnited of Miami Lakes, which inherited six local offices, has thrived since the Kanas group took over in May 2009.

The bank turned a profit of $192 million last year and $65.2 million in the first quarter of 2010. At $11.3 billion in assets, it remains the largest Florida-based financial institution.

Investors in BankUnited include W.L. Ross & Co., headed by restructuring specialist Wilbur Ross, and the Carlyle Group and the Blackstone Group, two of the world's biggest private equity firms.

North American Financial looked at nearly 60 banks before deciding to make its initial investment in TIB Financial, according to Chief Financial Officer Christopher Marshall who, like CEO Taylor, is a Bank of America veteran.

"We continue to look at a lot of banks, and this is just the first of many investments that we may make," Marshall told SNL Financial. "This was the first one that we were able to culminate an investment in, but there are several that we have a really strong interest in, and we are hopeful that we'll be able to invest in them as well."

TIB had lost $56 million since 2008 and was under regulatory orders to raise capital. NAFH, whose investors also include former Bank of America head honcho Hugh McColl, trumped a bid by a private equity group backed by former Huntington Bancshares executives from Ohio to invest $150 million for control of TIB.

The group buying National Bank in Port Charlotte engineered a move to quintuple the bank's size right away. Ovation Holdings Inc. has bought four branches of Encore Bank with $171 million in deposits that it will merge into National, a one-office bank with a $29.5 million deposit base.

Private investors have pumped $14 million into Community Bank of Manatee, which had become undercapitalized from loan losses. The investors, from New York and Brazil, left founding CEO Bill Sedgeman in charge and brought in a new president.

Unlike past economic cycles, no one is rushing to start a new community bank to fill the void left by failures and mergers. Regulators are reluctant to approve new bank charters in states like Florida, which leads the nation in bank failures this year.

"It may be a long time before we see a new banking charter," Knautz said. "But eventually the cycle will repeat and folks will organize community banks, and hopefully they will be prosperous.

"I cannot imagine this area would ever find itself in a spot where there are limited choices in community banking," he said.