$4.1B Purchase of FirstBank to Add Markets for PNC

PNC Financial said Monday that it plans to buy Colorado-based FirstBank for $4.1 billion, giving PNC a substantial presence in the Colorado banking market as well as Arizona's. FirstBank, which is typically branded as 1stBank, is a midsize bank based in Lakewood that operates 120 retail branches with $26.7 billion in assets. The bank is privately held, but the banks disclosed that the stockholders of FirstBank who collectively own 45.7% of the shares have already voted in favor of the merger, the AP reports.

PNC has been on an acquisition streak in the past few years to made the Pennsylvania-based bank one of the biggest players in retail banking in the country. PNC bought the US operations of Spanish bank BBVA shortly after the pandemic for $11.6 billion. The FirstBank acquisition will make PNC the largest bank in the Denver market and will give PNC more than 70 branches in Arizona. PNC will also grow to roughly $575 billion in assets.

PNC is typically referred to as a super regional bank, one of a group of banks that are significant in size, often with hundreds of billions in assets and hundreds of branches, but are dwarfed by the giants—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase. This deal will put PNC closer in size to Capital One and US Bank, PNC's closest rivals. "To succeed long term, as you watch the very big banks grow, we need to be in all markets and have really good products at low cost," PNC's chief executive told analysts this summer, per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.