The Determined CEO Leading Pittsburgh’s F.N.B.

*The following feature appears in the third quarter 2025 issue of Bank Director magazine. It and other stories are available to magazine subscribers and members of Bank Director’s Bank Services Program. Learn more about subscribing here.

Pittsburgh is a gritty, industrial town, known around the world as Steel City. A popular local sandwich to feed workers packs meat, coleslaw, cheese and French fries between two slices of Italian bread.

Although the steel industry is mostly gone and the city has struggled with population decline, native-born Vincent Delie Jr. has been working hard as the company’s chairman and CEO to make F.N.B. Corp. a growth story, nonetheless. For a long time, F.N.B. existed under the shadow of much bigger bank names: PNC Financial Services Group is headquartered in Pittsburgh, too.

Mellon Financial Corp. got its start here, before it was bought by The Bank of New York Co. F. N.B., the holding company for First National Bank of Pennsylvania, is small by comparison. But it has been growing and acquiring banks across the mid-Atlantic and into the Southeastern U.S. Last fall, it opened a 26-story glass-walled headquarters building in the lower Hill District in Pittsburgh. During Delie’s time in executive leadership, it has grown from $8.7 billion in assets in 2009 to $49 billion. Although he’s had his critics, Delie’s efforts illustrate his confidence that the institution will succeed and thrive as a regional player in a competitive industry.

The roots of that drive and ambition were in Pittsburgh itself. Delie was born and raised there, the descendant of Italian immigrants. He grew up on the north side, an inner-city, “rough around the edges,” neighborhood, according to David Morehouse, the executive vice president for strategy for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Filled with hard-working people, the north side had hit hard times by the 1970s when Delie was growing up. The steel industry was dying. His father, a chemical salesman, had to change jobs. His mother went to school to become a nurse and worked two jobs. In her 80s now, his mom still works full-time. “My parents struggled early on because they had five kids,” he says. “We weren’t in abject poverty but also had nothing. … We all had to work.”

Delie’s memory of his childhood includes having to fight neighborhood kids for survival. “I got beat up regularly,” he says. That upbringing affected him. Morehouse says Delie has an ambition and drive that’s palpable. “You can see it when he walks down the hall,” he says. “He means what he says and says what he means.”

Another Vince joined the company shortly after Delie, in 2007. “We’re both Italian,” says Vincent Calabrese Jr., chief financial officer. “We’re passionate people, I guess. … He’s got a lot of passion about what we’re trying to achieve as a company.”

Delie exudes energy and enthusiasm. But he struggled through much of his youth. He remembers being sent to a special school because he wrote the number three backwards and would substitute the wrong word when writing. Later, he learned he has dyslexia. He paid his own college tuition but got laid off from his first job as a stockbroker after the stock market crashed in 1987. “I was devastated,” he says. “I had student loan debt, a car payment, and I’m like, ‘What am I going to do?’” He temporarily moved back in with his parents and got another job on a trading desk at PaineWebber. He was offered an opportunity to move to New York. Newly married, he and his wife decided not to make the move.

A New Chance
Instead, he took a job at Equibank, a Pittsburgh-based institution that closed in 1993. Still young, Delie was in a management trainee program during the S&L crisis — he kept his job when many around him were laid off because he was doing loan review. Eventually, all that hard-luck experience paid off. Delie became an executive vice president over corporate banking in Pittsburgh at a big bank, Ohio-based National City Bank. He had a good job, but there weren’t a lot of opportunities to grow. By 2005, he had hit a career ceiling.

A $5.6 billion community banking institution based in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, F.N.B. was about an hour’s drive outside of Steel City. Executives recruited Delie to try to build business in Pittsburgh. He called a market research firm, which informed him that the company’s subsidiary, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, didn’t even “fog the glass” in Pittsburgh. A lot of people thought he was crazy to make the move to a much smaller bank. But he took it.

James Orie, the company’s chief legal officer and corporate secretary, remembers managers meetings in Hermitage. Delie, who was hired in 2005, showed up and kept telling the group that the bank needed to grow. “And I think everybody sitting in a room goes, ‘Wait a minute, we’re a community bank up here in Mercer County,’” Orie says. Delie had 1,000 ideas. If you listened to him in those meetings, you would have thought Pittsburgh was the biggest part of the bank. The other executives thought the bank was a success and doing the right things, but Delie pushed them to think bigger. “Did it rub people the wrong way?” Orie says. “Definitely.”

But Delie says the executives thought it would be easier to grow the bank in Pittsburgh than it was. “I think they really underestimated the competitive environment initially, their ability to recruit people, the deficiencies in the product set. … there were great challenges,” he says.

Eventually, the board put Delie in the running to become CEO, a job he got in 2012. To get the position, he wrote a paper envisioning the bank’s trajectory. More than a decade later, the vision in that paper has been realized, says James Chiafullo, an F.N.B. board member. “He sees down the field a long, long way,” he says. “He has a visionary approach to things.”

One of those visions was to move the headquarters from Mercer County to Pittsburgh. It had gotten too hard to recruit staff to the small town where the bank was located. But Delie also knew the bank had to grow beyond Pittsburgh. For decades, the city had been losing population.

The bank has embarked on an acquisition program to rival any serial acquirer. It has purchased 15 banks since 2005. The bank now operates in seven states and the District of Columbia.

Investment banks helped F.N.B pick its targets. If the bank could theoretically get to the top five or top 10 deposit market share in major metropolitan areas, that would give F.N.B. a seat at the table when a potential client was looking for bids. “You’re now at a point where enough people know you, and you have a big enough delivery channel that you’re going to be asked to look at [lending] opportunities,” Delie says.

The bank also looked for metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 inhabitants that had a similar economic profile as Pittsburgh, as the bank has a strong commercial and industrial lending portfolio. So far, it has expanded into Baltimore, Cleveland, Washington, D.C.; Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and the Piedmont Triad (Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point) in North Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina.

“We’re going to look at a variety of ways to deploy capital, not just M&A,” Delie said during F.N.B.’s first quarter earnings call this year. “I think we’ve broadened our footprint. You asked about what markets we’re most interested in. We’re going to continue to build out our presence in the Carolinas and in the Southeast. We have tons of potential to continue to grow deposits, particularly in Charlotte and Raleigh and the Piedmont Triad. I think we’ve only scratched the surface.”

But not everyone was pleased with F.N.B.’s acquisitions. The bank announced a deal in 2016 that would put it in the Carolinas for the first time, before other banks began announcing plans to try to enter the high-growth Carolinas, says Russell Gunther, a managing director and equity research analyst at the investment bank Stephens. The purchase of $7.2 billion Yadkin Financial Corp. in Raleigh, bumped the bank up to $30 billion in assets. “They jumped a couple of states to get there,” Gunther says. “And traditionally in bank land M&A, investors like a nice contiguous footprint, something that they can wrap their heads around mentally. These guys leapfrogged a couple states to go into the Carolinas, and I think it took some time for that proof of concept to bear fruit.”

Gunther says that put the bank’s stock in the penalty box for more than a year. The deals have sometimes angered employees, too. F.N.B. doesn’t try to keep the selling bank’s charter or culture, and some workers have been laid off. This has led to threats on Delie’s life. On a recent tour of the new headquarters building, he had a security guard follow him around when he left the executive office floor and went down to the lobby. “I’ve had people calling the branches saying they were going to blow me up, blow up my family,” he says.

Growing Pains
Still, he hasn’t backed down. The Yadkin deal was part of a grand plan to build as far north as possibly Boston or New York and south to Florida, Orie says. The bank saw an opportunity to jump forward in its plan by getting into North Carolina. It took a while for the acquisition to be accretive to earnings. Ultimately, the Carolinas have been among the bank’s strongest markets, Orie says.

Gunther says migration to the Southeast has been stronger than the mid-Atlantic or Midwestern areas. The deal “fundamentally changed the overall growth profile of F.N.B., and it opened up their ability to expand their fee income verticals as well,” he says. Gunther explains that roughly 22% of the banks’ income comes from fees, which is above peer banks. That includes insurance, mortgage banking, wealth management and capital markets. Within the last 10 years, the bank has doubled revenue in capital markets and has a trading floor in the new headquarters building.

The growth hasn’t been about hitting a certain size. “Some banks would have an asset target, ‘We want to be $50 billion by next year.’ We never had that,” Calabrese says. “We wanted to … grow it in a way that makes sense and improves the profitability as you’re growing, instead of just some arbitrary number.”

Still, sailing past $50 billion, which will happen likely this year from organic growth, means heightened regulatory standards, Orie says. There’s a checklist of over 3,400 items the bank has had to prove to regulators within 18 months of going over that asset size. They’ve been hiring staff and working on coming into compliance for three years, Orie says.

To that end, the growth hasn’t come at the expense of higher net charge-offs, Gunther says. “And frankly, this asset quality measure is another point of differentiation for them,” he adds. “They tend to have lower loss rates than their similarly commercial-oriented peers.” He says the management team is transparent in answering analyst and investor questions, and has established credibility. “When you can put up predictable and repeatable results, that tends to generate a multiple over time,” he says.

Credit Concerns
Brian Martin, director, banks and thrifts at Janney Montgomery Scott, says Delie has “surrounded himself with very talented people who all work together pretty seamlessly.” For years, F.N.B. operated with less capital than peers. In fact, when Delie joined the ranks, the bank was paying out nearly 100% of its earnings in dividends. That wasn’t sustainable, he says. That has changed, and the bank is more than well capitalized now.

It could need the capital if the current economic environment deteriorates in the face of uncertainty and tariffs. Banks that are run conservatively tend to survive tough economic times. F.N.B.’s executives say they are indeed that type of bank. Delie understands that credit is the bank’s foundation. When other banks are taking on too much risk to win clients, the bank pulls back. “Vince is not, ‘Hey, why are we getting beat up? Why is ABC Bank beating us?’” Orie says.
There are other ways the bank could be protected from a storm. The deposit base is diversified.

The bank kept cash on hand when rates were low pre-2022, instead of investing in a lot of long-term bonds, says Calabrese. “We stayed short as far as the duration, like three, four years, so that when those securities matured, we could reinvest that at higher rates down the road,” he adds.

“We’ve always had a conservative bent to our culture and how we run the bank.”

Investors are currently concerned about the impact of tariffs and a potential recession on the C&I-heavy bank, and that was weighing on the bank’s stock and other bank stocks in general in the second quarter.

In advance of any questions from the board or analysts, Delie and his team started doing an analysis in January of borrower impacts from potential tariffs. The markets at that time didn’t anticipate President Donald Trump would announce hefty tariffs as one of his first orders of business, Orie says. The bank gave regulators a report within days of Trump’s April announcement showing the stress testing the bank did modeling tariff impacts. “[Delie] could be actually the world’s greatest chief risk officer because he already is looking ahead. ‘What’s the next wave? What’s the next thing signaling some event?’” Orie says.

The bank’s chief credit officer, Gary Guerrieri, also looked at the impact of federal spending and employment cutbacks in the D.C. area. The executives surveyed more than 50% of the commercial and industrial and owner-occupied portfolio, and found less than 5% of exposure was at risk of greater impact from direct tariffs. The bank has stepped up communication with borrowers, many of whom were pulling back on expansion plans or using excess liquidity to beef up inventories to avoid supply chain disruptions. Of all the banks Gunther covers, he says F.N.B. had the most comprehensive answer to questions on its first quarter call about those impacts.

Delie says his tendency to seek immediate answers and analysis when there are signs of trouble goes back a long way in his career — it was forged during the savings and loan crisis when he worked in loan review. Working in so many different areas of banking also helped. “I think I’ve been subjected to so much, that I have so much experience to draw upon, that I immediately go into crisis mode,” he says. “This isn’t just me. This is my whole team. We’re all the same age, so we all came up through these series of crises, the stock market crash, the Gulf War, September 11.”

To that end, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, the bank went into overdrive monitoring the health of borrowers and stepping up a digital lending platform. To this day, the bank thinks it got thousands of new clients based on its ability to offer customers the government’s Paycheck Protection Program quickly.

A Digital Mindset
Even before the pandemic made virtual banking more popular for everyone, Delie took an interest in technology. His team estimates that it was more than a decade ago that Delie came up with the idea for what the bank calls an e-store, which Orie describes as an “Amazon-like” experience.

On the web or in branches, customers can pick from a selection of products and services that encompass all the bank’s offerings. Although it sounds simple, it took a lot of wrangling for the bank. Managers of the different departments wanted to do their own thing for their customers, but that wouldn’t work with the e-store, and it wouldn’t give the bank a full picture of the customer, Calabrese says. The products would have to be standardized and rolled out for newly acquired banks, too. “Clicks-to-bricks, that was [Delie’s] idea,” he says. “He coined that term, to make your banking seamless, whether you’re on your phone, your tablet [or] your computer; you’re home or you’re in the branch.”

The bank has deployed more than 120 ATMs with video chat technology, which allows customers to see and talk with a banker who is stationed at a remote location in Pennsylvania, says Barry Robinson, chief consumer banking officer. The virtual bankers are available from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. All a customer needs to start a session is an ID — no debit card required.

The bank also developed its own data analytics program in-house because it didn’t want to pay outside companies to access its data. It began hiring data scientists from retailers such as DICK’S Sporting Goods and American Eagle Outfitters, an industry that is more advanced than banking, says Delie. Nowadays, the bank can analyze its data to generate leads. It knows which customers are paying another bank for a loan, for example, and combines that with external data to figure out what to offer each customer to refinance.

To make such initiatives work, Delie has gotten involved in the design and planning of products at a level other CEOs often don’t. Delie takes an intense interest in the inner workings of the bank. “I’ve worked with CEOs before … where they’re high level, and they lose that touch of the depth of the organization,” Orie says. “He hasn’t lost that. My sense is, he knows exactly every part of this business, who is doing what or who’s not doing what.”

Hometown Investments
A lifelong Pittsburgh resident, Delie has also taken an interest in the city’s well-being. The company decided it needed a new headquarters. Employees were spread across several buildings, and the air conditioning and heating didn’t work well. The city rejected the bank’s first proposal for a site. Then came along Morehouse, who at the time was CEO of the city’s hockey team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. They had bought property for a new stadium that included a 28-acre parcel that Morehouse wanted to sell to F.N.B.

Those 28 acres were in a historically Black neighborhood called the Hill District. When Delie was growing up, there was a jazz club and a lively community. The Black playwright August Wilson grew up there and had oriented several of his plays in the area. After the city destroyed homes and churches to build a civic arena and a highway, the neighborhood was cut off from the rest of Pittsburgh and was in decline, Delie says. Morehouse and a development group proposed building F.N.B.’s new headquarters there, including several floors of office space to be leased. It is part of a larger development in the neighborhood to include a Live Nation concert venue, parking and community aid. The Live Nation concert hall is under construction.

The development qualified for a tax abatement program, where property taxes are redirected to the development costs. F.N.B. ended up advancing $7.2 million from the tax abatement to a trustee to be dispersed by the city’s Greater Hill District Neighborhood Reinvestment Fund. Most of the funds have not been spent. Delie says 30% of the contracts for the new headquarters construction went to minority-owned businesses, and 15% went to women-owned business. But it was a long road to get there, with lots of community meetings and discussion about whether to allow the tax abatement and what benefits the community should get. “If you didn’t have somebody with his drive and persistence, I don’t know that it would’ve happened,” Calabrese says.

The bank also committed to spending about $235 million in loans, investments and grants in the Hill District. One of the beneficiaries is $15 million Hill District Federal Credit Union. The institution serves a population whose average annual income is $25,000 to $35,000, says CEO and Treasurer Richard Witherspoon. The small credit union offers auto loans at 8% interest to borrowers with credit scores as low as 550 and small dollar loans for emergencies such as auto repairs. It offers a line of credit of up to $20,000 to local businesspeople who struggle to get capital — F.N.B. backs the loans. That’s a good thing, since the credit union sometimes has double-digit delinquencies in its loan portfolio.

Such a tiny financial institution also needs cash sometimes. When the credit union’s core processor went out of business a few years ago, Witherspoon needed $45,000 for a new one; F.N.B. gave him $40,000 for it. The bank also gave him a grant to help renovate the credit union’s building. Customers of the credit union can use F.N.B. ATMs for free. “I’ve had a lot of experience with financial institutions,” Witherspoon says. “They all had accounts here. What makes them different at First National is they’ve been able to retain their community spirit.”

In February, he attended F.N.B.’s ribbon cutting for its new headquarters. Situated on the edge of the Hill District facing downtown, it’s a glass edifice jutting into the sky all by itself without much development around. Witherspoon calls it the “icicle.”

After struggling and persevering for so many years, Delie can now look out over the city of Pittsburgh from his perch on the 26th floor, which he had designed so it was similar in layout to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s executive offices in New York. The offices are encased in black and white marble, but mostly a material called Marvel, which mimics marble. That was the CFO’s idea. “He saved millions of dollars,” Delie says. He can also look out and see The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.’s building. PNC’s headquarters is a few blocks away.

As the sun sets on the day, the FNB Financial Center’s red, white and blue logo lights up the night sky from the top of the building. BNY Mellon’s sign also lights up the sky. But the lights in the word Mellon have gone dark.