Bigger banks may be racing to serve mass-affluent and younger wealthy customers, but New York City-based Apple Bank is content to stick with its middle-class roots.

That’s according to CEO Steve Bush, who’s led the privately held, $20 billion-asset bank for about a decade. Still, the lender is working to bring in younger customers and has boosted its marketing efforts, trying new paths to enter the collective consciousness “to a greater degree than we typically would have done in the past, because it's a digital world,” Bush said.

“It's a challenge to get the attention of people on the street in a way that it didn't used to be,” he said during a recent interview.

The bank, founded in 1863, has a large base of older, loyal retail bank customers, many of whom are “the middle and working class of New York City – teachers, nurses, administrators, people in hospitals, people in the school system, small-business people, just regular families in the suburbs,” he said. 

But the lender’s age is not “guaranteeing anything about the future,” said Bush, who noted “Credit Suisse failed at 166.” 

Apple Bank expects to spend about $10 million this year on marketing efforts, which have included fostering connections with Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and a set of teenage sisters who have a financial literacy-focused YouTube channel. The bank’s marketing expense has been fairly consistent over the last four years, and is expected to remain flat in 2027, a spokesperson said. 

To build a younger customer base, Apple Bank’s high-yield savings account geared toward kids has increased branch traffic, as have branch events bringing in school or youth sports groups, Bush said.

At the lender’s size, customers aren’t shy about calling Bush when the bank has made a mistake, or to offer suggestions, he said.

“There's a role in service, if you can deliver it, that people are still looking for,” he said.

To get a foot in the door with many customers, however, smaller players like Apple Bank need larger lenders to slip up, Bush said.

Amid an increasingly competitive landscape, the biggest banks have honed their consumer-banking service by employing easy-to-use systems and advanced technology, and “99% of the time it works very well,” he said. 

As a small bank, “you need for those banks to have a problem,” he contended, “to really have an opportunity.”  

“But big banks annoy people, on a regular basis,” he said. “You want to be able to take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves, but you have to punch through to consciousness.”

Apple Bank battles all five of the largest U.S. lenders within its geographic market, but Bush sees benefits to serving the nation’s flagship market.

“The good thing is that New York is so large, and populations are always recharging the system with new blood,” he said. “You do have chances to get new customers just out of the turnover.” 

The bank is pursuing growth beyond New York, too. Apple Bank’s assets have grown about 24% over the past five years, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data. 

The lender has about 79 branches across New York and New Jersey. Newer branches in the Garden State have added about $1 billion in deposits; those openings have been funded by the sale of some “mausoleum branches” the bank had since the 1930s that were far larger than the branch space it needs today, Bush said. 

Apple Bank is assessing further physical expansion in New Jersey or Florida. Apple Bank has about 1,200 customers in Florida who’ve migrated from New York, so the bank is working to brand-build in the state before opening branches.

“You don't need to be the most numerous animal on the plains roaming around,” Bush said. “There's a big ecosystem out there, and there's lots of room, I think, for the kind of personal service, attention, things that mid-sized banks in general and Apple specifically can deliver to customers.”

The bank has also sought to change its state charter to a national one, Bush said. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved the move Tuesday.  

“Part of the benefit of that is allowing us to expand with some simplification to new markets that might be quite different,” Bush said.