The seven branches City National has opened over the past year is the most since the $83.4 billion-in-asset bank was acquired by Toronto’s Royal Bank of Canada in 2015 in a $5 billion cash and stock deal.
The branch expansions are part of a larger growth spurt underway at the bank — L.A. County’s largest in terms of assets.
The bank last week expanded its private banking team to advise wealthy customers in Philadelphia and Morristown, N.J., and recently appointed a former Wells Fargo executive, Abel Montanez, to head up the private banking line.
It also has bulked up on its workforce.
In L.A. County, employment at City National has jumped 36% to 3,500 in June from 2,580 at the time of the RBC merger. Nationally, the workforce has grown 49% to 5,180 from 3,480 in 2015, underscoring its national footprint expansion.
City National also has been beefing up its community investment in charitable and civic programs locally. The bank gave $7 million in the first year after its acquisition to $12.8 million in 2019 and $13.2 million during the pandemic — its biggest donation to date.
Linda Duncombe, City National’s executive vice president in charge of community investment and leading the bank’s digital transformation, said giving local community investments could rise even more this year. “It continues to be core of what City National Bank stands for,” she said.
Last week, City National officially opened branches in downtown’s Bunker Hill and downtown Santa Monica. These are the bank’s first branches to open this year. Last year, during the height of the pandemic when workplace restrictions were in full force, City National opened five branches along the East Coast.
Of the five branches opened last year, three were in New York City, and one each in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., where City National has built a sizeable banking hub. Future expansion also is planned in the Silicon Valley.
“We are not a bank heavy in branch volumes or overlap. To open a branch is at least a two-year project, from concept to doors opened,” said Scott Witter, City National’s executive vice president of personal and business banking.
“We are in a constant state of evaluation of our branch network, those 75 offices, and where do we want to be that we don’t have branches, and maybe where we don’t want to be where we do have branches,” he said. “We had half a dozen branch concepts when the pandemic hit and could have just frozen everything, and we talked about whether we should. But those branch locations that we identified 18 months earlier … are locations we wanted no matter how the pandemic ended,” he added.
