Customers Bank Opens Five West Coast Locations

A bank with over $24 billion in assets under management is greatly expanding its presence in the Western U.S., just a few years after Northern California’s regional banking crisis and as other firms shirk from the region’s high cost of doing business.

Customers Bank, a subsidiary of Customers Bancorp, has opened five locations in California and Nevada combining for just over 30,000 square feet, Commercial Observer can first report. The bank’s expansion is a reflection of its belief in the continued growth of West Coast markets despite their innate challenges, Sam Sidhu, Customers Bank president and CEO, told CO.

“They’re great markets,” Sidhu said. “There is a high cost of doing business. There is a lot of competition, etc. But I would argue that there has been a dearth of strong combinations of local community banking and corporate banking, post the wave of either bank closures or bank [mergers and acquisitions]. They’ve lost a lot of the community banks.  … I think customers are looking for that relationship-type banking, as opposed to the 1-800 number, or worse, like black box type banking, where you don’t know what you’re going to get.

Customers’ new 8,293-square-foot Irvine location, at Irvine Company’s 4 Park Plaza, is the largest of the new office cadre. The bank’s other new 5,767-square-foot Southern California location is at Douglas Emmett’s 15301 Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. It will also take 4,043 square feet at 621 Capitol Mall in Sacramento; 7,779 square feet at 6900 South McCarran Boulevard in Reno, Nev.; and 4,122 square feet at 6720 Via Austi Parkway in Las Vegas.

“We’re not as intentional in saying, ‘we need to be in Santa Monica.’ We don’t start with that type of mentality,” Sidhu said. “Rather, it’s, ‘what are our goals for the West Coast? What are our goals for the Los Angeles region? What are the types of customers we want to sort of bring in that would be valuable to this bank? And how can we sort of create a cluster of a local community bank within the area?’ And then we go out and find the best bankers, and then we bring in the bankers where they are.”

Customers Bank’s move to California comes just a few years after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and subsequent failures of Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, ultimately due to the rapid rise in interest rates that crushed the banks’ bond holdings.

The SVB, Signature and First Republic closures were, respectively, the second-, third- and fourth-largest bank failures in American history. Yet some real estate industry professionals worry that the sheer amount of distressed real estate debt — nearly $1 trillion of debt was set to mature in 2025 alone — could trigger the next banking crisis, and could take the country’s financial system down with it.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.