Pennsylvania bank to buy FirstBank for $4.1B, expanding to Arizona, Colorado

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.

Based in Lakewood, Colorado., FirstBank, which is typically branded as 1stBank, is a midsized bank that operates 120 retail branches with roughly $26 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.

PNC has been on an acquisition streak in the last few years to made the Pennsylvania-based bank one of the biggest players in retail banking in the country. PNC bought the U.S. operations of Spanish bank BBVA shortly after the pandemic.

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, a group of large national banks that are significant in size, often hundreds of billions in assets and hundreds of branches, but are dwarfed in size by the banking giants Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.