Citizens Bank president, chairman and CEO is Lawrence K. Fish
The challenge for Providence-based Citizens Bank, says its chairman Larry Fish, is for it to continue its growth, while keeping its commitment to providing “small bank” style service to its customers. That challenge is becoming more difficult as Citizens in recent weeks first added State Street Corporation’s commercial banking business and then, last week, announced an agreement to acquire Massachusetts-based USTCorp. for $1.4 billion, another commercially oriented institution.
“I don’t want to ever get too big,” said Fish of the bank, whose parent is the Royal Bank of Scotland. “I want to make sure this company is big enough to compete. But I never want to get too big that we can’t behave small
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“We’ve always been a good consumer bank,” Fish said. “We’ve always had a large retail banking business. Now we’ve become a very major commercial banking organization and by doing so we’ve become a complete bank, both retail and commercial. It isn’t that we’re smaller in retail, but we’ve added dramatically to the commercial side
“I think our job is to do a constantly good job for our customers and continue to be a great place for our employees to work,” Fish said. “We’ve big enough now. We can provide convenience. We can provide product. We can provide value. What we have to do is deliver it with service it’s a really powerful combination. We’ll be very focused on doing those things now as opposed to just getting bigger.”
Once the approvals are all complete – along with the completion of the Fleet-BankBoston merger – Citizens will become the region’s second largest banking institution, behind the merged Fleet and BankBoston, and the 33rd largest bank nationally, Fish said, with assets of $28 billion..
The USTCorp acquisition is the bank’s 17th in 11 years. With the acquisition, Citizens’ assets will have grown from $4.4 billion in 1992 to $28 billion, once the UST acquisition is complete in January 2000.
USTCorp. will become part of Citizens Bank Massachusetts, adding nearly $6 billion in assets to bring Citizens’ total assets to the $28 billion. USTCorp. will also add 87 branches, bringing the combined total to 370, and 212 ATMs for a combined total of 784.
U.S. Trust Corp. president and chief executive officer is Neal Finnegan.
Fish would not speculate whether federal regulators would require any divestiture of branches, and neither Fish nor USTCorp. President and Chief Executive Officer Neal Finnegan, would speculate on whether Citizens would pursue any of the branches that Fleet and Bank Boston must divest if its merger is to receive regulatory approval.
In terms of jobs, Fish and Finnegan said the banks have identified 800 overlapping positions, meaning those jobs would be eliminated. However, Fish said, between the two banks there are currently 500 openings because of a tight job market, and that some employees would be offered the opportunity to switch jobs. Other positions, Fish said, would be eliminated through attrition, and that layoffs were possible.
The acquisition was announced last week in Boston because USTCorp. is a Massachusetts Bank and will become part of Citizens’ Massachusetts. Rhode Island is the company’s corporate headquarters, and Fish and other bank officials said the bank has no intention of moving its headquarters from Rhode Island.
“I want to be absolutely clear that Providence will continue to be our headquarters,” Fish said. “Providence is our home. It’s where our roots are. Rhode Island is where we employ more than half of our people. I think if we ever left Providence, we’d run a large risk of forgetting who we are. There’s a wonderful down to earthiness about being headquartered in such a great city as Providence. It mostly has to do with values, and roots, and traditions.”
With the acquisition, Finnegan will become non-executive Chairman of Citizens Bank Massachusetts and a director of Citizens Financial Group.
Thomas J. Hollister will continue as president and chief executive officer of the Citizens Bank of Massachusetts, which becomes Citizens’ largest division, growing from $8 billion to $14 billion in assets.
Citizens currently operates in Rhode Island, where it has 62 branches and where it was established in 1828 as the High Street Bank on Hoyle Square in Providence; in Massachusetts, where, pending approvals of the UST Corp. and State Street acquisitions, it has more than 100 branches; in Connecticut, where there are 43 branches; and New Hampshire, with 75 branches.
And what does the acquisition mean for Rhode Island? Fish said: “It’s sort of the little engine that could. The little Hoyle Square savings bank has grown up to be the second largest banking company in New England. Symbolically, it is a victory for the home town team.”
