Why Boston is the next battleground for First Citizens

• Key insight: First Citizens is expanding its presence in Boston after its Silicon Valley Bank purchase, joining a flow of banks into the area. 
• What's at stake: Bank of America, Citizens and Santander together hold 47% of deposits in the Boston area.
• Expert quote: "I think M&A will continue to accelerate because there can only be room for so many and there are so many banks that are not expanding or growing." — Ally Akins, Capital Performance Group

BOSTON — When First Citizens BancShares bought the failed Silicon Valley Bank in the heart of the 2023 banking crisis, the deal marked the bank's first foray into Boston, making it one of several superregional and national banks moving into or expanding in the area in the last few years.

JPMorganChase opened 50 branches in Boston over the past five years. PNC Financial Services Group and M&T Bank are also looking to disrupt Bank of America's top market share.

In September, Cleveland-based KeyCorp announced plans to expand in the Boston area, where it has a commercial-banking presence but no retail branches, the Boston Business Journal reported.

"Boston is a high-priority market for Key," the regional bank's CEO, Chris Gorman, wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.

The banks are coming for the same reason SVB bought Boston Private Bank in 2021, enhancing the local infrastructure that First Citizens acquired after SVB's failure. Boston is more affluent than other U.S. metropolitan areas of similar size, and it has deep pockets of companies in healthcare, biomedical research, tech and venture capital, plus some 50 colleges, from MIT and Harvard through to community colleges, that spin off new firms continuously.

"All these businesses are very attractive to banks," said Ally Akins, a principal at Washington, D.C.-based bank consulting firm Capital Performance Group, where she is the co-lead of the marketing and sales practice.

The local landscape

Bank of America, which bought serial acquirer FleetBoston in 2004, is still one of the area's largest banks, with 28% of local deposits. BofA, Citizens Financial Group and Santander US hold 47% of deposits locally, Akins said.

Boston has also seen a spate of recent local bank mergers. In September, the parent company of Berkshire Bank, Berkshire Hills Bancorp, completed a merger with Brookline Bancorp, the parent of Brookline Bank, BankRI and PCSB Bank, rebranding as Beacon Bank & Trust. In April, Eastern Bankshares announced plans to buy HarborOne, its third local merger in five years. Last December, Independent Bank Corp., which owns Rockland Trust, said it would buy Enterprise Bancorp.

"I think M&A will continue to accelerate because there can only be room for so many and there are so many banks that are not expanding or growing," said Akins.

The ensuing upheaval created opportunities for other community banks, which tend to be good at customer service and hand-holding, allowing them to "actually compete with the largest banks," she said.

Start with startups

Into this turmoil stepped First Citizens, which American Banker named the top-performing bank with more than $50 billion in assets this year for the second year in a row.

"We're pretty happy with Boston," said Ron Sanchez, the executive who oversees the Boston area and seven adjacent states, one of First Citizens' nine regions. "It presents some strong opportunities we don't have in other markets. We have the ability to grow in this environment."

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based bank typically grew by building new branches, which is how it expanded in its Southern home market and on the West Coast. But the technology it inherited with its SVB purchase allows it to grow faster now, Sanchez said: "In Boston in particular, the tech is bringing us the ability to serve all," from mass market all the way to high net worth clients.

This is the playbook First Citizens is using as it grows into other markets like Atlanta and Florida. "We're building out these markets because of the sheer size," Sanchez said, while in smaller areas, the bank's expansion is "more digital, leveraged from the center."

As First Citizens absorbs SVB, it is using what Sanchez dubbed a "retain and expand strategy" of trying to keep existing clients while also using outbound selling to bring in new customers — even putting bankers on planes to meet new accounts when required.

"People want to bank with people," said Sanchez, who's been in the industry for four decades and at First Citizens since 2009. "They're looking for bankers who can help them scale their business."

So far, the bank has 800 people based in New England, including 500 in Boston, with 80 tasked to wealth management. Among the five Boston branches are a Back Bay location, which just underwent renovation; a new branch in the downtown financial district; an updated Beverly branch; a Wellesley location, for which the bank just bought real estate to construct a new building; and a Cambridge office, close to the campuses of Harvard and MIT, which Sanchez wants to upgrade to serve innovation and tech banking. As the branches get renovated, Sanchez wants them to have better signage, no teller lines and space for private bankers.

(First Citizens also has a back-office location an hour north in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a factoring and leasing unit that specializes in rail cars, which it inherited when it bought CIT in 2022.)

Finish with wealth management

The bank is building up its wealth management arm in the area, hiring 50 advisors so far in 2025, said Dwight Mathis, First Citizens Wealth's New England regional managing director, who joined the bank and moved to Boston last year after 15 years at Bank of America's Merrill Lynch wealth unit.

First Citizens hopes to build on SVB's 40 years in Boston, especially where the failed bank lent to venture capital and private equity firms and the startups and companies they funded. "It takes a special appetite to lend to them, to understand who they are," he said. "It's hard for others to replicate, and it's easier said than done."

The idea is to build a relationship between young companies, their founders and executives, and the bank, encompassing business banking and wealth management — what Mathis calls "seed to bloom to legacy." One example is the Startup Banking team, which he said serves an "enormously unprofitable group of clients" who hopefully one day will turn out to be wealthy. If the bank can attract these entrepreneurs early, it could potentially engender loyalty that could lead to business lending, investment banking, real estate loans and wealth management relationships.

Mathis recalled a recent Boston visit from Hope Holding Bryant, First Citizens' vice chairwoman, who runs the bank's branches and wealth management arm: "She said, 'Dwight, can you imagine what this city's going to mean to this organization in five years?'"