Dive Brief:

• Citizens plans to hire more private wealth teams and open additional private banking offices by the end of the year, President Brendan Coughlin said Tuesday, as the regional lender seeks to expand its unit serving high-net-worth clients. 
• The Providence, Rhode Island-based bank has about 10 private wealth teams – in Southern and Northern California, Boston, New York, as well as Palm Beach, Florida and soon West Palm Beach – and intends to add at least five more teams this year, Coughlin said during an industry conference appearance.
• Citizens also has seven private banking offices and aims to grow that number to 12 by the end of 2026, he said. New offices are set to open in Menlo Park and Laurel Village, California; West Palm Beach; and Greenwich, Connecticut. 

Dive Insight:

The private bank was responsible for about 7% of Citizens’ earnings in 2025, and the $226 billion-asset lender expects that to reach the mid-teens in the medium term, Coughlin said. As of the fourth quarter, the private bank had about $14.5 billion in deposits and $10 billion in client assets, according to an earnings presentation. 

Coughlin sees distinction in the type of private bank client to which Citizens is marketing. The net worth of the private bank’s target client is $5 million, with $2 million or more in investable liquid assets, he said.

“Traditional retail banks don't serve that client well. Traditional private banks tend to have their cutoff a bit higher, and so we believe there is tremendous white space and opportunity left behind by the West Coast bank failures, to go into that market and really provide high-end, white glove service to that customer base,” Coughlin said.

Many of those customers are also business owners and have personal banking relationships, so a single point of contact at the bank is distinctive, he said. While that seems straightforward, “when you think about the money-center banks, they tend to be too big and too bureaucratic to pull that off, and when you think about the smaller firms, they tend to not have the sophisticated capabilities,” he said.

In 2023, Citizens submitted bids to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for failed regional banks Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, but lost each time, first to Raleigh, North Carolina-based First Citizens, and then to JPMorgan Chase. Still, Citizens gained 50 private bankers from First Republic, before announcing plans in September 2023 to launch its own private bank.    

Citizens was interested in copying some elements of First Republic’s model, “principally their service, culture and intensity,” Coughlin said. 

But other aspects of the business model were flawed and needed changing, he said. 

Citizens has prioritized running the private bank in a way that’s accretive to return-on-equity, creating a high-quality liquidity profile that's sticky and self-funding, “pristine credit,” market-based asset pricing and strong expense discipline, he said. 

As Citizens has spent the past two years building out the private bank, “we've been able to drive the growth and keep returns at the same time with that target segment because of the client experience,” Coughlin said. 

When asked how the bank seeks to stand out from competitors also targeting those specific clients, Coughlin said “service is the simple answer.” 

Coughlin said he’s met hundreds of clients, and their focus “was all about the talent we brought on, the absolute obsession with experience that they deliver, making banking frictionless, and then it's the integration. These folks don't want to have a banker for their business relationship and a separate banker for their financial planning and wealth, and then go deal with the retail branch for their personal banking.”

Having one person that’s tapped into all of the client’s needs and accounts, serving as a “generalist manager” with an expert team, is crucial, he said, and few banks are doing that.

Citizens has also sought to distinguish its consumer bank as geared toward mass affluent customers, Coughlin said. Other lenders such as Truist have noted a particular interest in attracting mass-affluent customers. 

“We're going to have mass-market customers, but we're unlikely to out-bank JPMorgan and Bank of America at scale with digital capabilities,” he said. Mass-affluent is “also where the profit pools are in retail banking. So with deposit fees getting regulated or competed away, mass-affluent is the place to be.”

The lender has overhauled its consumer business, focusing on relationship banking and working to grow its household base, reposition its capital book and replace non-core loans with private-banking loans, he said. 

“In the retail franchise, 75% of our wealth revenues actually come from our retail franchise and the 3 million retail customers that we have,” he said.

Coughlin also noted Citizens is launching a new digital app in the coming weeks and plans to add branches in core locations. The lender counts about 1,000 branches in 14 states and Washington, D.C.