First Citizens Brand Guidelines: The 1898 Bank of Smithfield, CIT & Silicon Valley Bank

A county bank in Johnston County, North Carolina.

First Citizens Bank traces its start to March 1, 1898, when the Bank of Smithfield opened for business in Smithfield, North Carolina. A 2016 “This Day in North Carolina History” note from the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources names its founder as Allen W. Smith, who stayed on as president until 1906, and calls it Johnston County’s first bank. The company’s own timeline describes the early bank as the county’s only one, serving mainly farm customers.

The name changed as the bank grew. The state note says it became First National Bank of Smithfield, then merged with Citizens National Bank to form First and Citizens National Bank, and in 1929 took the name First Citizens Bank & Trust Company. The legal entity still carries a hyphen, First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, while the name customers see does not. In 1986, according to English Wikipedia, the business was reorganised under a holding company, First Citizens BancShares, Inc.

One family has run the bank for most of its history. Robert Powell Holding joined as an assistant cashier in 1918 and became president in 1935, the state note says, steering the bank through the Depression and the Second World War; by 1957 it was the second-largest bank in North Carolina, according to the same source. His three sons then held the posts of chairman, president and vice president. The company says that Frank B. Holding Jr. became chairman in 2009, with his sister Hope Holding Bryant as vice chairwoman, the third generation of the family at the top. By 1974, the company says, it had moved its headquarters from Smithfield to Raleigh, where it remains.

From a state bank to a national one.

For most of the 20th century First Citizens stayed inside North Carolina. The company says its first branches outside the state came in 1994, through the purchase of a bank based in West Virginia, and that in 1997 it chartered a federal thrift, Atlantic States Bank, to serve Atlanta. That thrift later became IronStone Bank, which was merged into First Citizens in 2011, according to English Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s list of acquisitions runs to dozens of small banks, many in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, along with several failed banks taken over from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after 2009, among them Temecula Valley Bank in California and United Western Bank in Denver.

The largest step before 2023 was a merger with the commercial lender CIT Group. First Citizens announced its completion on January 4, 2022, in a release distributed by PR Newswire, which said the combined company would operate under the First Citizens Bank name, with CIT, CIT Bank and OneWest Bank running at first as divisions. The company called the result a top-20 US financial institution by assets and the largest family-controlled bank in the country.

Then came Silicon Valley Bank. California’s state financial regulator closed the Santa Clara bank on March 10, 2023, and the FDIC moved its deposits and most of its assets into a bridge bank that the agency ran itself, the FDIC’s failed-bank page says. On March 26, 2023, the FDIC announced a purchase-and-assumption agreement under which First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company took on the deposits and loans of Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, N.A. The 17 former branches reopened as First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company on March 27, 2023, and the FDIC and the bank agreed to share losses and recoveries on the commercial loans it bought, according to the same release. Silicon Valley Bank now runs as First Citizens’ innovation-banking division, serving high-growth companies and investors, the company says.

Design and documentation.

US regional banks tend to present themselves through place. Many carry a state, a city or a region in their names, or keep the name of the town where they were founded long after they have spread across several states. Their identities usually rest on a short wordmark in blue, green or red, set beside photographs of local streets, branch staff, small-business owners and families buying homes. Founding years matter too: several of the banks in this guide trace their roots to the nineteenth century, and their histories are told through the names they have carried since.

Their websites follow a familiar pattern. Pages for checking and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans sit alongside sections for commercial lending, treasury services and wealth management, so that one brand speaks both to households and to companies. Several of the banks in this guide also run more than one name: local brands kept after a merger, or a single brand carried into new states.

Visibility outside the branch often comes through sponsorship. Ballparks, arenas, theatres and arts seasons have carried bank names, and those names change when banks merge. Annual reports, community reports and investor presentations form a second public record, setting out where a bank operates, which brands it uses and how it describes its history.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, which mergers shaped it, and what has happened to its name — and keeps the bank’s own claims separate from what dated sources report. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own.

Forever First, and a name kept through every merger.

The brand customers meet rests on a short promise. In 2013, the company says, it launched Forever First, a brand line meant to carry R. P. Holding’s principles forward for generations; the phrase still has its own page in the bank’s About section. The company describes its manner as banking “on a first-name basis.”

The website presents the business in five parts: personal banking through branches and digital channels; small business; commercial banking, from treasury services to trade finance; wealth management through First Citizens Wealth; and innovation banking through Silicon Valley Bank. Its commercial pages list specialist teams for sectors such as agribusiness, maritime, premium wine and railcar leasing, a range of specialist work that the website presents under its commercial banking pages. In 2024, the company says, it opened First Citizens India, a support centre, and First Citizens BancShares appeared on the Fortune 500 list for the first time. The parent company owns the First Citizens Bank trademark, according to the bank’s website.

Across all of this the name has stayed the same. After the CIT merger the combined company took the First Citizens Bank name, while Silicon Valley Bank kept its own name as a division, so the group now carries a town bank’s name alongside the name of a California technology lender.

For a design guide, First Citizens Bank shows how a county bank from 1898 can keep a plain, civic name through mergers that brought in a national commercial lender and a technology bank with a brand of its own. Compare it with Truist and with Webster Bank, a Connecticut savings bank that grew through its own 2022 merger. For this guide we use a deep green, warm stone and a brass accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep First Citizens’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.