One might expect the daughter of a bank executive to start out their career by sliding right into a cushy corner office.
Not First Citizens' Perry Bailey, daughter of Chair and CEO Frank Holding, Jr. She started out in the trenches as a teller at a branch in Winston-Salem, helping customers who no doubt didn't realize they were depositing a check or making a withdrawal with North Carolina banking royalty.
"My focus in my career has always been on learning as much as I can," says Bailey, who started with the organization in 2016 and is now a Regional EVP. "As a teller or on customer service lines, I learned an appreciation for what customers need and what associates face on a daily basis. My best lessons came from those early conversations."
That training in multiple lines of business should come in handy, since over the years First Citizens has developed a specialty in an area with a fairly high degree of difficulty: Absorbing troubled banks.
Take its deal with Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. It's a high-risk, high-reward kind of transaction—and as we saw during the financial crisis, any missteps can be very damaging to the acquiring company. But with its history of doing similar deals, federal regulators seem to trust First Citizens to be able to pull it off.
One of Bailey's first big missions for the company was to help take care of their own, with its employee banking program. "Associates spend all day helping customers, but it's difficult to do that all day long and not be able to do that for yourself," she says. "So our mission was to support that community and make sure they got the same attention that they give to customers."
Acting as a kind of guide to steer Bailey up the mountain peaks of the business: Ron Sanchez, the bank's Regional EVP. His marching orders: No special treatment for family.
"I've been tasked with helping develop the next generation of talent, and I think that it's great that she started at the bottom and worked her way up," Sanchez says. "One thing most people recognize about her is that she's a student of the game, and a real sponge for knowledge."
Bailey's current focus is somewhat counterintuitive: In an era when many banks have been ignoring or closing smaller, often rural branches that don't offer much return or growth potential, First Citizens has made it a point of focus to maintain and invest in them.
Bailey has been tasked with developing that community model, which is essentially a long-term play. It's not a big driver of quarter-to-quarter earnings, for instance, but it cements the bank as a key pillar of communities and strengthens local ties.
Now with the bank's acquisition of dozens of BMO branches in the Midwest and Mountain West—announced in 2025, and finalizing this year—Bailey is helping roll out that community model to new swaths of the country.
"Many communities these days have been abandoned, with a lot of other companies just pulling out," she says. "But we decided we wanted to stay, and invest, and show up for our customers."
