Citizens plans to close between 100 and 120 supermarket-based locations and, instead, opt to launch 50 to 60 stand-alone branches nearby, with a greater emphasis on advice, private banking, wealth and serving small businesses, the bank said Thursday in a second-quarter earnings presentation.
“This type of careful investment in physical locations and in people, if executed well, should create a nice lift in the deposit trajectory without taking on the risk and significant capital expenditure of opening a whole bunch of de novos outside of the footprint,” Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun said Thursday on a conference call.
That reinforces a strategy other top Citizens executives have espoused in recent months.
“The 14 states we operate in today offer more than enough opportunity when it comes to the consumer bank,” Matt Boss, head of Citizens’ consumer bank, told Banking Dive in May.
It stands in contrast to other regional banks such as Huntington and Fifth Third – both Ohio-based banks that stretched their respective footprints by acquiring Texas-headquartered lenders last year.
As early as April 2025, Nuno Dos Santos, Citizens’ head of branch distribution, spotlighted the bank’s “aggressive” position on reinvesting in a transformation of its existing locations.
Once close to 7,000 square feet, Citizens’ new or renovated branches encompass about 2,000 to 3,000 square feet, with far less emphasis on transactions and more on space for banker conversations with clients.
Citizens President Brendan Coughlin spoke to Banking Dive in March, noting that – particularly in New England, “we’re going to do a lot of surgery around some of our legacy markets.”
That meant gearing the bank toward mass-affluent customers and above, and making branches “more impressive, [on] the right corner, [with] the right staffing.”
Citizens is hardly the first bank to aim for the mass-affluent segment. Truist and Regions, for example, have embarked on the same pivot.
Nor is Citizens the first to dispatch with in-store branches. When Huntington acquired TCF in 2021, it closed nearly 100 Michigan-based branches couched inside Meijer grocery stores. Similarly, People’s United closed 140 branches located inside various Stop & Shops, just ahead of the Connecticut bank’s acquisition by M&T. U.S. Bank and PNC have also made similar moves with grocery store branches.
Citizens projects the branch retooling won’t impact the bank’s goal to reach 16% to 18% return on tangible common equity by the end of 2027.
In its second-quarter earnings statement, also delivered Thursday, Citizens reported 13.9% ROTCE, up from 12.2% three months earlier.
Meanwhile, the bank’s profit jumped 35% year over year, in the second quarter, to $587 million. And revenue rose 12% year over year to $2.3 billion, Citizens reported Thursday.
