The Sunday Night Phone Call
On the evening of Sunday, March 26, 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced that a bank most Americans had never heard of would absorb the smoldering wreckage of one the country's most iconic financial institutions. Silicon Valley Bank — forty years of venture capital relationships, $110 billion in assets, the connective tissue of the entire American innovation economy — had been dead for sixteen days. The buyer was First Citizens BancShares, a family-controlled lender headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded in 1898 to serve tobacco farmers in Johnston County. Its chairman and CEO, Frank B. Holding Jr., went on CNBC the next morning and described the transaction in a tone one might use to discuss a favorable rate on a certificate of deposit. "This is a remarkable transaction in partnership with the FDIC that should instill confidence in our deposit system," he said. First Citizens' stock opened at $582.55 on the previous Friday. By Monday's close, it sat at roughly $896 — a 54% single-day gain. By the start of 2024, shares traded above $1,400. The company's market capitalization had roughly quadrupled in nine months.
The deal was not a rescue in the romantic sense. First Citizens acquired $72 billion in SVB loans at a discount of $16.5 billion, assumed $56 billion in deposits, received a $70 billion line of credit from the FDIC for liquidity purposes, and entered a loss-share agreement to split potential credit losses. Analysts at Janney called it getting SVB "for free." Stephen Scouten at Piper Sandler offered a sharper formulation: "I don't think they got it for free. I think they were paid $16 billion to take it." The FDIC received $500 million in First Citizens equity and estimated the failure would cost its deposit insurance fund approximately $20 billion. For First Citizens, the math was almost absurdly favorable — a $16.5 billion purchase discount on performing assets, backstopped by the federal government.
But the SVB acquisition was not an aberration. It was the culmination of a 125-year operating philosophy executed across three generations of the same family, through depressions and recessions and interest rate cycles, with a consistency that borders on the geological. First Citizens had been rehearsing for this moment for decades, buying failed banks out of FDIC receivership more times than any other institution since 2009. The SVB deal just happened to be the one the world noticed.
By the Numbers
First Citizens BancShares
$220B+Total assets (2024)
$200B+Total assets reported on corporate site
16,000+Employees nationwide
500+Branches across 30 states
13thLargest U.S. bank by assets
125+Years in operation
~70%Holding family voting control
#182Fortune 500 ranking (2024 debut)
Ten Thousand Dollars in Smithfield
The origin story is almost too neat, the kind of founding mythology that later success retroactively imbues with meaning. On March 1, 1898, the Bank of Smithfield opened its doors with $10,000 in capital — Johnston County's sole financial institution, serving farmers whose livelihoods depended on tobacco prices and the weather. The founding president was Allen K. Smith, and the early years were unremarkable in the way that small-town American banking was meant to be unremarkable: accept deposits, make sensible loans, survive.
The inflection came in 1918, when a young man named Robert Powell Holding joined the bank as an assistant cashier and bookkeeper-teller. By that point, total reserves had reached $500,000. Holding possessed the defining characteristic of every consequential banker in American history — an instinct for when to be conservative and when to move — and within a few years he was elected president. Under his leadership, the bank adopted a statewide charter, changed its name to First-Citizens Bank &
Trust Company, and did something that most of its contemporaries failed to do during the Great Depression: it grew. While other banks closed, taking depositors' life savings with them, First Citizens added customers, accounts, and assets. Liaquat Ahamed's
Lords of Finance captures the broader context — a global financial system in which banking panics were not aberrations but features — and R.P. Holding navigated it by adhering to principles so simple they barely qualify as strategy: don't lend what you can't afford to lose, and never stop growing.
When Holding died in 1957, the bank held $200 million in assets. His three sons — Robert Jr., Lewis "Snow," and Frank B. — were all under thirty-two years old. The family took over anyway. This was not a corporate succession plan vetted by McKinsey. It was a family deciding that the business their father built was theirs to continue, and that continuity of culture mattered more than credentialed management. Robert Jr. became chairman, Lewis president, Frank vice president. The bank kept growing.
Four generations of family leadership
1898Bank of Smithfield founded with $10,000 in capital.
1918R.P. Holding joins as assistant cashier; later becomes president.
1935R.P. Holding elected president and chairman; branches extend to Raleigh.
1957R.P. Holding dies; three sons (all under 32) assume leadership.
1974Headquarters moved to Raleigh; assets surpass $1 billion.
2009Frank B. Holding Jr. becomes chairman and CEO — third generation.
2018Frank Holding Sr. dies at 89; had led SC expansion for decades.
The Architecture of Patience
For most of the twentieth century, First Citizens did what successful community banks do: it grew organically, added branches across North Carolina, and avoided the kind of aggressive lending that periodically destroyed its competitors. By 1974, it had moved headquarters from Smithfield to Raleigh and crossed the billion-dollar asset threshold. By the 1990s, having purchased roughly thirty smaller North Carolina banks over the preceding decades, it ventured out of state for the first time, acquiring a bank in West Virginia in 1994. In 1997, it chartered a federal thrift subsidiary — Atlantic States Bank — to serve the Atlanta market, a predecessor to its eventual coast-to-coast expansion.
The bank's conservatism was not the absence of ambition. It was ambition channeled through a time horizon that publicly traded, quarterly-earnings-obsessed institutions cannot replicate. The Holding family controlled more than 70% of voting power. They did not hold quarterly conference calls. They did not court Wall Street analysts. They did not issue forward guidance. This opacity was strategic: it insulated management from the short-term pressures that cause banks to chase yield in good times and panic in bad ones.
Frank B. Holding Jr. — the current chairman and CEO, who took the role in 2008 and the chairmanship in 2009 — embodies this philosophy with an almost monastic discipline. He rarely speaks to the media. In a 2015 interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, one of his few on the record, he described the bank's acquisition strategy with characteristic understatement: "I'm going to confess that we look for opportunities for expansion regularly." But he added the crucial qualifier: "We're not focused on geographic expansion. We would rather add flesh to our existing frame." The metaphor is revealing. First Citizens does not build new skeletons. It adds flesh to the one it has.
His sister, Hope Holding Bryant, serves as vice chairwoman. Their brother-in-law, Peter Bristow, is president. Between the three of them, they control more than 22% of voting rights directly, a figure that rises to approximately 50% including the broader family. "Families don't think quarter-to-quarter," Bryant has said. "They think about next year and five or ten years after that. And so do we."
The Recession Playbook
The 2008 financial crisis did not threaten First Citizens. It fed it.
While the nation's largest banks were absorbing trillions in federal bailout funds and watching their share prices collapse, First Citizens — conservative, well-capitalized, virtually unknown outside the Carolinas — began buying failed banks out of FDIC receivership. The playbook was straightforward: identify a failed institution, bid competitively in the FDIC's auction process, acquire assets at a discount, retain the best customers and employees, integrate operations onto First Citizens' existing platform, and repeat.
Between 2009 and 2011 alone, the bank acquired Temecula Valley Bank in California, Venture Bank in Lacey, Washington, Sun American Bank in Boca Raton, Florida, First Regional Bank in Los Angeles, United Western Bank in Denver, and Colorado Capital Bank in Castle Rock, Colorado. These were not headline-making transactions. Most were small community banks — the kind whose failures barely registered in the national financial press. But each one extended First Citizens' geographic footprint, added deposits, and gave the bank experience navigating the precise regulatory and operational complexities of FDIC-assisted deals.
We've been through this before. We go through a competitive process, bid process, and we like to think that our competitive bid was not just the function of the quality of bid we put and the competitiveness of it but also the strength and stability and soundness and expertise that we bring to the transition.
By the time the SVB crisis arrived in 2023, First Citizens had completed more FDIC-assisted transactions since 2009 than any other bank in America. The institutional muscle memory — how to evaluate distressed loan portfolios, how to negotiate loss-share agreements, how to onboard panicked depositors, how to retain relationship bankers in the chaos of a failed institution — was embedded in the organization's DNA. The SVB deal was not a leap. It was the same play, run at a vastly larger scale.
The First Doubling: CIT Group
Before SVB, there was CIT. And the CIT acquisition, completed in January 2022, is in many ways the more revealing strategic decision — the one that transformed First Citizens from a large regional bank into something genuinely different.
CIT Group was a New York–based financial holding company with deep roots in commercial lending, equipment finance, factoring, and leasing. It had been through its own near-death experience: a bankruptcy filing in 2009, a restructuring, and a rebirth under CEO Ellen Alemany, who had spent her career at Chase, Citibank, and RBS Citizens Financial Group before taking over CIT in 2016. Alemany — a New York City native, educated at the University of Bridgeport and Fordham, a veteran of three decades of institutional banking — represented everything First Citizens was not: urban, corporate, credential-heavy, operating in the Wall Street orbit. But CIT brought capabilities First Citizens desperately needed: nationwide commercial lending, a direct digital bank, equipment finance and leasing operations, and relationships with middle-market industrial clients that a North Carolina branch network could never reach.
The merger, announced in October 2020 and structured as a deal valued at approximately $2.2 billion, effectively doubled First Citizens' asset base — from roughly $41.6 billion to over $100 billion. It was, at the time, the most ambitious thing the Holding family had ever done. And it worked. The integration brought commercial banking expertise, a coast-to-coast lending platform, and — critically — a rail and shipping equipment leasing business that would prove remarkably durable.
Frank Holding Jr. described the strategic logic in his characteristically spare way: "This transaction leverages our solid foundation to add significant scale, geographic diversity, compelling digital capabilities and, most importantly, meaningful solutions for customers throughout their lifecycle." The bureaucratic language obscured the audacity. A family-controlled bank from Smithfield, North Carolina, had absorbed a New York institution with a Wall Street pedigree and a bankruptcy in its recent past. And it had done so without diluting family control, without abandoning its relationship-banking culture, and without missing a beat operationally.
By the time the SVB opportunity materialized fourteen months later, First Citizens had already proven it could integrate a transformational acquisition. The CIT deal was the dress rehearsal.
Forty-Eight Hours in March
The story of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse has been told many times, but the speed of it still astonishes. SVB had served the innovation economy for forty years, banking venture capital firms, startups, and wealthy tech workers. Its deposit base had tripled during the pandemic-era tech boom, swelling past $200 billion by 2022. Rather than lend all of those deposits, SVB invested heavily in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities — instruments that were considered ultra-safe until the Federal Reserve began its most aggressive interest rate tightening cycle in a generation.
As rates rose, the market value of SVB's bond portfolio plummeted. On March 8, 2023, the bank disclosed a $1.8 billion loss on the sale of securities and announced plans to raise $2 billion in fresh capital. The announcement triggered exactly the kind of panic it was designed to prevent. Prominent venture capital firms — including
Peter Thiel's Founders Fund — advised portfolio companies to withdraw deposits. The bank run was digitally accelerated: depositors attempted to pull $42 billion in a single day. By March 10, regulators seized SVB and placed it into FDIC receivership. It was the second-largest bank failure in American history, after Washington Mutual's collapse in 2008.
Two days later, New York–based Signature Bank fell. First Republic Bank, serving a similar clientele, teetered. The crisis was threatening to become systemic. The federal government stepped in to guarantee all deposits at SVB and Signature, even those exceeding the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit. But the question remained: who would actually buy SVB?
The FDIC ran a competitive auction. The bidding pool was thin — most large banks either lacked the capital, the regulatory appetite, or the operational capability to absorb $110 billion in assets on short notice. First Citizens, fresh off the CIT integration, with a CET1 ratio well above regulatory minimums and a proven track record of FDIC-assisted acquisitions, emerged as the winning bidder.
This transaction leverages our solid foundation to add significant scale, geographic diversity, compelling digital capabilities and, most importantly, meaningful solutions for customers throughout their lifecycle.
The terms were extraordinary. First Citizens purchased $72 billion in loans at a $16.5 billion discount to book value. It assumed $56 billion in deposits. It received the FDIC's $70 billion credit line and entered a loss-share agreement providing downside protection against credit losses. It did not acquire SVB Financial Group's holding company assets, common stock, preferred stock, debt, or any Cayman Islands operations. Cryptocurrencies were excluded. The deal was structured, in other words, to give First Citizens the franchise — the relationships, the talent, the brand — while the FDIC absorbed the toxic residue.
On Monday, March 27, SVB's seventeen branches opened as "Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank." A tobacco farmer's bank from Johnston County now owned the beating heart of American venture capital.
The Paradox of the Conservative Acquirer
The central tension in the First Citizens story is not financial. It is cultural. How does a self-described "conservative relationship bank" absorb an institution whose entire identity was built on financing the highest-risk segment of the American economy — pre-revenue startups, venture-backed companies burning cash faster than they could raise it, investor-dependent borrowers whose business models might never generate a dollar of profit?
Frank Holding Jr. addressed this directly on CNBC the morning after the deal: "At our core, we are a conservative relationship bank, and what we see at Silicon Valley is a real passionate commitment around their customer service. We will find much more in common here than not." The framing was deliberate. He was not positioning SVB as a departure from First Citizens' identity. He was redefining SVB through the lens of First Citizens' values — relationship banking, client-centricity, long-term thinking.
The early integration numbers suggested this was more than rhetoric. By November 2023, First Citizens had added over sixty new primary operating business clients in the SVB segment. Deposit balances, which had been hemorrhaging during and after the crisis, largely stabilized. Global Fund Banking — SVB's franchise in lending to private equity and venture capital funds — saw its pipeline expand by approximately 40% quarter-over-quarter by Q4 2023, closing $4.8 billion in new deals in the fourth quarter alone, a 129% increase over Q3.
But the headwinds were real. SVB's investor-dependent loan portfolio — $4.3 billion, roughly 3% of total loans, with the highest-risk early-stage segment at $1.4 billion — was generating elevated net charge-offs. The venture capital environment remained depressed: muted fundraising, a difficult exit environment, and cash burn exceeding inflows. Craig Nix, First Citizens' CFO, was characteristically direct on the Q4 2023 earnings call: "While we continue to see stress in our general office portfolio... we have limited exposure." But the SVB innovation portfolio was a different animal — one that required First Citizens to learn a new dialect of risk.
The Balance Sheet as Strategic Weapon
What makes First Citizens unusual among large American banks is not its growth rate or its acquisition history. It is the way its balance sheet functions as a weapon of strategic optionality.
At the end of Q4 2023, First Citizens reported a CET1 ratio of 13.36% — well above its internal target range of 9% to 10%. Even excluding the impact of the FDIC loss-share agreement (which contributed approximately 120 basis points) and including AOCI marks under proposed Basel III rules, the estimated CET1 ratio was 11.8%. The bank was accreting capital at roughly 36 basis points per quarter while growing risk-weighted assets at only 27 basis points. It was, in effect, building capital faster than it was deploying it — creating a growing reservoir of optionality for future acquisitions, share repurchases, or defensive positioning.
Cash sat at approximately 17% of earning assets, versus a long-term target of 10% to 12%. This was intentional. The excess liquidity served multiple purposes: it provided a buffer against unexpected SVB deposit outflows, it enabled the bank to methodically migrate into higher-yielding securities (roughly $8 billion deployed from cash to securities in the second half of 2023), and it preserved the option to prepay the FDIC purchase money note — a floating-rate obligation maturing in March 2028 — whenever the arbitrage between cash yields and the note's cost turned unfavorable.
The net interest margin contracted to 3.86% in Q4 2023, down 21 basis points sequentially, driven by declining accretion income and rising deposit costs. Excluding accretion, NIM was 3.46% — still robust by industry standards, but reflecting the reality that SVB's deposit base, concentrated in tech companies and venture-backed startups, was inherently more rate-sensitive and flight-prone than the branch network deposits of a traditional community bank.
Craig Nix projected full-year 2024 net interest income in the range of $6.9 billion to $7.1 billion, with accretion income declining from $725 million (in the last three quarters of 2023) to approximately $485 million for 2024. The adjusted efficiency ratio was expected to rise modestly to the low 50% range, up from 49% for full-year 2023, reflecting continued investment in regulatory readiness, technology platforms, and the SVB integration.
The Organism That Grows Through Crises
The pattern is now unmistakable. First Citizens does not merely survive financial crises. It metabolizes them.
In the Great Depression, it grew while competitors failed. During the 2008 financial crisis, it acquired six failed banks in three years. In the pandemic-era dislocation, it absorbed CIT Group and doubled in size. When the 2023 banking crisis destroyed SVB, it doubled again. An institution that held $41.6 billion in assets in March 2020 crossed $219 billion by March 2023 — a fivefold increase in three years.
This is not luck. It is the product of a specific organizational design: family control that enables long-term thinking, conservative underwriting that preserves capital through cycles, deliberate opacity that shields management from quarterly earnings pressure, and institutional experience with FDIC-assisted acquisitions that creates a repeatable, scalable playbook for capitalizing on others' failures.
The question is whether the organism can continue to grow at this rate without the structural advantages that enabled its past. First Citizens is now a top-20 U.S. bank, subject to enhanced prudential standards, stress testing requirements, and the proposed Basel III endgame rules. It is building out regulatory infrastructure at scale — hiring compliance officers, modernizing technology platforms, establishing a Global Capability Center in India with more than 850 associates. The company that never held quarterly conference calls now hosts them. The company that prided itself on operating below the radar is on the Fortune 500 (#182 in 2024) and the Forbes Best Banks list.
Families don't think quarter-to-quarter — they think about next year and five or ten years after that. And so do we.
Frank Holding Jr.'s 2025 Chairman's Letter struck a tone that balanced institutional confidence with awareness of the transformation underway: "Our relationship-based, client-centered approach remains as it has for more than a century." But the letter also unveiled a new vision statement — "To build lasting financial security that grows with the greatest ambitions of our clients, colleagues and communities" — the kind of corporate language that signals a company in the process of becoming something it has never been before. The question is whether it can become that thing without ceasing to be what it was.
Three Segments, One Machine
By the end of 2024, First Citizens operated through three distinct segments, each with its own risk profile, growth trajectory, and strategic purpose.
The General Bank — the legacy First Citizens branch network — is the ballast. More than 500 branches across 30 states, serving individuals, small businesses, and wealth management clients. This segment grew loans by double-digit percentages in 2023, driven by small business and commercial lending in the branch network. Deposits here are sticky, relationship-based, and diversified — the kind of funding base that does not evaporate when Peter Thiel tweets.
The Commercial Bank — inherited primarily from the CIT merger — provides coast-to-coast lending in industry verticals: technology, media and telecom (TMT), healthcare, energy, equipment finance, and middle market banking. Growth in 2023 was concentrated in TMT (driven by data center demand), healthcare, and energy (power infrastructure and renewables). The middle market team expanded into Boston, New York, Santa Monica, Atlanta, and Dallas, adding bankers and loan production throughout the year. Capital markets had its highest quarterly revenue on record in Q4 2023, as First Citizens exploited market dislocation while other banks pulled back.
The SVB Segment — Silicon Valley Bank, operating as a division — is the franchise. Global Fund Banking, the largest such operation in the industry, provides credit facilities to private equity and venture capital funds. Technology and healthcare banking serves innovation economy companies at every stage, from seed to IPO. Private banking and wealth management serve the executives and investors in the ecosystem. This segment carries the highest risk (investor-dependent loans, early-stage company exposure) but also the highest strategic value: access to the innovation economy's most valuable relationships.
The three segments form a diversified whole that is more resilient than any individual part. The General Bank provides stable, low-cost deposits. The Commercial Bank generates consistent, relationship-based lending income across industries. The SVB Segment offers asymmetric upside — when venture capital markets recover, the loan pipeline ramps, deposits flow back in, and the franchise's full value becomes visible.
The Direct Bank and the Funding Question
One of the less discussed but strategically significant features of the post-CIT, post-SVB First Citizens is its direct bank — a digital-only deposit-gathering channel inherited from CIT that now accounts for approximately 26% of the total deposit base. This is a double-edged instrument.
On one hand, the direct bank is an efficient, scalable source of FDIC-insured consumer deposits. It enabled First Citizens to pay down higher-cost Federal Home Loan Bank borrowings and redeem subordinated debt, improving the overall funding mix. During the SVB crisis, when the acquired deposit base was hemorrhaging, the direct bank channel grew by $2 billion in Q4 2023 alone — a critical stabilizer.
On the other hand, direct bank deposits are higher cost and less sticky than branch network deposits. They are rate-sensitive: customers can move money with a few taps on a phone. They do not carry the relationship depth — the cross-sell opportunities, the community ties, the switching costs — that make traditional branch deposits so valuable. Craig Nix acknowledged as much, noting that direct bank growth would be moderated in 2024 ("less than 10%") given excess liquidity, but that the channel remained "an additional lever" to maintain resilience.
The funding question is central to First Citizens' next chapter. The FDIC purchase money note — a significant floating-rate obligation — matures in March 2028. The bank has estimated a long-term debt shortfall of $8 billion to $11 billion under proposed regulatory requirements. A programmatic issuance of long-term debt was set to begin in 2024, supplemented by deposit growth strategies across all three segments. The bank's ability to replace the purchase money note with lower-cost, more durable funding — primarily core deposits from the General Bank and recovering SVB balances — will be a defining operational challenge over the next several years.
What the Family Built
In January 2026, First Citizens BancShares reported fourth quarter 2025 earnings. The details of those results are not yet fully public as of this writing, but the trajectory is clear. An institution that three years earlier had been a mid-size regional bank — well-run, conservatively managed, utterly anonymous — is now a top-20 U.S. financial institution with more than $200 billion in assets, a Fortune 500 company, a Forbes Best Banks honoree, and the operator of the most recognized brand in innovation economy banking.
The Holding family still controls the enterprise. Frank Holding Jr. still rarely speaks publicly. Hope Holding Bryant was named one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking in 2025. Peter Bristow remains president. The culture, by all accounts, has not changed — or has changed only in the specific ways required to support a bank five times the size it was in 2020.
The stock, which you could have purchased for roughly $400 before the CIT merger closed, traded above $1,400 by early 2024. Over the past three years, First Citizens' stock price has soared by approximately 142%, outpacing every other publicly listed bank. The company debuted on the Fortune 500 at #182. It was ranked #24 on Fortune's list of fastest-growing companies.
And yet the thing that made all of this possible — the family control, the long-term thinking, the willingness to be patient for decades and then act with devastating speed when opportunity arrives — is the same thing that makes the future uncertain. The skills required to run a $40 billion community bank are not the skills required to run a $220 billion diversified financial institution subject to enhanced prudential standards. The regulatory buildout alone — stress testing, Dodd-Frank compliance, ISO payments, Basel III endgame — represents a permanent increase in complexity and cost. The SVB segment, for all its franchise value, carries credit risks (investor-dependent loans, general office CRE) that the old First Citizens would never have touched.
The bank has responded by investing aggressively in talent — hiring David Leitch, a former Bank of America vice chair and global general counsel, to the board; bringing in Greg Smith from TD Bank as Chief Information and Operations Officer; establishing a Global Capability Center in India. The 2025 Chairman's Letter introduced refined culture pillars and a new vision statement. These are the moves of an organization that understands it is becoming something new.
But the paradox remains. The culture that built First Citizens — slow, patient, relationship-driven, family-controlled, deliberately opaque — is precisely what enabled the SVB acquisition. And the SVB acquisition is precisely what is forcing that culture to evolve. Whether it can evolve without dissolving is the open question.
On the About SVB page of First Citizens' website, the division describes itself this way: "We are dedicated to the success of those who are quite literally inventing the future, and we have the full backing of 125-year-old First Citizens to continue to pursue that mission." The sentence contains the entire tension: the future and 125 years, in the same breath. A bank that started with $10,000 in tobacco country, now backing the companies that are inventing what comes next. R.P. Holding's three sons, all under thirty-two, deciding to run the bank themselves after their father died. Frank Holding Jr., on a Sunday night in March, deciding to buy the most famous failed bank in a generation. The same instinct, across the same bloodline, separated by sixty-six years and $210 billion in assets.
