How Citizens Financial positioned itself to scoop up private bankers from First Republic

Citizens, headquartered in Providence, R.I., has $222 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, and is the 14th-largest bank in the U.S. I recently had a conversation with John F. Woods, vice chair and CFO at Citizens, for the latest edition of Fortune’s Future of Finance series.

“For a number of years, one of our strategic objectives has been to be able to serve high-net-worth individuals,” he told me. “We did that a while back when we acquired a company called Clarfeld. That created capabilities to provide advice to the high-net-worth customer segments. But we had been unable to scale that platform because of the need to have enough bankers to interact with this customer segment. The opportunity arose when First Republic started to get into trouble last spring.”

First Republic Bank was closed by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation on May 1, 2023, with the FDIC appointed as receiver.

“We had an opportunity to bid on acquiring First Republic,” Woods explained. “We didn’t win that bid—JPMorgan did. However, as part of that process, we became very attracted to the business model at First Republic. And a lot of the private bankers who worked at First Republic didn’t want to work at a very large bank—that’s the reason they worked at that bank in the first place.”

The conversation with a handful of people accelerated to about 150 people hired as private bankers to work in California, Boston, New York, and Florida, Woods said. The bank announced earlier this month the hiring of Michael Cherny as head of wealth management advisors and Tom Metzger as head of private wealth managers. Citizens has opened its first private-banking office in Boston and has plans to open additional offices in 2024, including in Palm Beach, Fla., and in Mill Valley, Calif., in the spring.

Woods expects the private bank is going to generate significant returns. “We just formally launched [the private bank] in the fourth quarter of 2023, and we have over a billion dollars of deposits already,” he told me. 

During our conversation, Woods also talked about how the CFO role is changing: “The evolution of the CFO role over the past decade or more involves an intensifying expectation that the CFO is a partner to the CEO and to the business unit leaders on deriving strategy.”

You can read the complete Future of Finance interview here.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Cosmin Pitigoi was named CFO at Flywire Corp. (Nasdaq: FLYW), effective March 4. Pitigoi previously spent 20 years in finance leadership roles at PayPal and eBay, where he was most recently SVP in PayPal finance. While at eBay, Pitigoi held leadership roles across investor relations, business unit FP&A and treasury, and began his career in operational and finance roles at E-Trade and Barclays.

Michael Niggemann is going to step in as interim CFO at Lufthansa Group, effective May 7, in addition to his existing duties as a board member for the division of Personnel, Logistics, and Non-Hub Business. Current CFO Remco Steenbergen is one of four executives stepping down as the airline is "reshaping and realigning its executive board," as stated in the announcement. The decision comes as the airline is moving away from the COVID-19 era, according to Lufthansa.

Big deal

While employers often rely on colleges as a principal supplier of professional talent, college is not a guarantee of labor market success, according to a new report by Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation.

Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward finds that one of biggest risks students face is that their degree will not provide access to a college-level job. Today, only about half of bachelor’s degree graduates secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation, the research finds. Among the underemployed recent college graduates, the vast majority (88%), are severely "underemployed"—working in jobs that typically require only a high school education, or less, such as jobs in office support, retail sales, food service, and blue-collar roles in construction, transportation, and manufacturing.

Just 12% are moderately underemployed, for example, working in jobs that require some education or training beyond high school but less than a bachelor's degree. The findings are based on dataset of 60 million workers in the United States, including approximately 10 million who has a terminal bachelor's degree.

However, participation in internships makes a difference. There is a strong correlation between internships and college-level employment after graduation, according to the report. The odds of underemployment for graduates who had at least one internship are, on average, 48.5% lower than those who had no internships. The benefits associated with completing an internship are relatively strong across degree fields.

Going deeper

An updated report from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and AICPA & CIMA finds that the largest global companies are providing more detail about their sustainability reporting, and also are obtaining a greater scope of assurance on those disclosures. The study, which is an annual benchmark now including 2022 data, also found the use of varying sustainability standards and frameworks continues to make it difficult for investors, lenders, and other stakeholders to find consistent and comparable sustainability information. 

Overheard

“If you don’t have everybody pretty much on board, you can have major countries not acting with a kind of cooperative sense; [then] they can make a real mess elsewhere.” 

—Blackstone cofounder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke at length about his fears on AI during a panel at the FII Priority Miami Summit, Fortune reported. He also argued that AI could help criminals that otherwise would not have been very bright.