Magazine : Archives : 2nd Quarter 2019

How FirstBank Profits from Being Private

An alluring narrative in banking nowadays is that only the biggest banks have enough scale to compete in the digital age. If multitrillion dollar institutions like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. can spend 12 times as much on technology and marketing as even the largest superregional banks, which each have hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, how can banks further down the food chain hope to survive? If that were the case, then how does one account for FirstBank Holding Co.? With $18.6 billion in assets, FirstBank is the biggest bank based in Colorado, where...