Customers Bancorp Acquires $631 Million Loan Portfolio From FDIC at Significant Discount and Recruits Venture Banking Team

Customers Bancorp (NYSE:CUBI), through its principal subsidiary, Customers Bank (“Customers”), has acquired a $631 million¹ venture banking loan portfolio from the FDIC at approximately 85% of book value.¹ Separate from the loan pool purchase, Customers has successfully recruited 30 team members from the group that originated these loans to service the venture-backed growth industry from seed-stage through late-stage.

The newly recruited team will give clients access to the capital to grow from innovation to maturity and leverage a customized, best-in-class tech platform to support their growth. The team has long-standing relationships with these clients offering them premier end-to-end financial services meeting all of their needs. The addition of these team members creates venture banking client coverage in Austin, the Bay Area, Boston, Southern California, Chicago, Denver, Raleigh/Durham, and Washington, D.C.

The new team is expected to be fully onboarded within the next few weeks.

“We are excited to welcome our new clients and team members to Customers Bank, a forward-thinking bank with strong risk management,” said Customers Bancorp Chairman and CEO, Jay Sidhu. “This team has deep relationships with their clients over the past two decades. They will enhance our relationship-based banking model focused on serving all banking needs of our clients,” stated Jay Sidhu.

The technology and life sciences portfolio will be combined with Customers’ existing Technology and Venture Capital Banking vertical based in Boston. The portfolio of capital call loans to venture capital firms will be combined with Customers’ existing capital call line portfolio in its Fund Finance group based in New York and Chicago.

“We are committed to following through on our stated goals of strengthening our deposit franchise, maintaining robust liquidity, moderating balance sheet growth, and improving our capital ratios and margins. This loan pool purchase was extremely attractive to us considering the historical customer deposit to loan ratio in this vertical of over 2 to 1. With the recruitment of this highly experienced team, we are extremely confident in our ability to build primacy of relationships with these new clients and further improve our liquidity profile with the addition of low-cost, core deposits,” said Customers Bank President and CEO Sam Sidhu. “Consistent with our disciplined approach, we will not take concentration risk and believe this transaction will be an excellent addition to further diversify our business model,” concluded Sam Sidhu.