Looking toward the future, Customers unveils new brand
West Reading-based bank has new logo, website and services.
Customers Bank isn’t changing its name, but the West Reading-based financial institution is unveiling a new look.
The bank announced Thursday morning that it will go through “a complete rebranding to reposition the bank as a fintech-forward-focused banking institution that provides commercial and consumer clients the stability, regulatory and trust inherent in working with an established bank.”
The rebranding will include a new logo, website and banking products. The logo features, according to a press release, two overlapping blue rings that represent the bank’s “obsession with connecting to customers
and providing highly personalized service.”
Chris Smalley, head of digital banking for Customers, said the changes are part of the bank’s expansion of services beyond community banking.
“Our broad goal is to catch our brand up with our technology capability and to evolve it to be consistent with our evolving customer base that has changed from being a locally driven community banking customer base to a much broader, national and expanded customer base,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “That’s not to say we won’t have any lesser focus on our community banking, but our community banking is expanding from West Reading and the Berks County area to offices in Florida, North Carolina, Chicago and Dallas with more to come. Beyond that we have a large digital presence across consumer small business and digital asset businesses.”
Customers, which has $20 billion
in assets that puts it among the top 100 banks in the nation,
has experienced growth in the past two years. According to the bank, it participated in about 347,000 Paycheck Protection Program loans with an aggregate value of $10 billion and has recently launched a blockchainbased real-time payments for cryptocurrency and digital asset institutions that drove $1.5 billion in deposits.
Smalley said the bank wants to remain in the forefront of financial technology.
“I think we are doing more than riding the wave, we’re trying to be the creators of the wave,” he said. “Things like entering digital asset business, building a large crypto customer base . . . . really there are only two other banks that are doing this on the institutional level. We’re the third. We’re out front in certain areas. We’re also way out front in terms of digital customer acquisition, we’ve built a multi-billion dollar consumer loan portfolio that’s on a national basis, not based out of our branch network.”
Smalley said Customers will introduce a suite of digital products in the first quarter of 2022 that will target small business customers on a national basis. It will help them make “a good decision about their financial future, get them the products they need, deliver through the digital channel very near instantly and fund those remotely without ever having to set foot in a Customers Bank branch.”
Smalley said the rebrand should be completed by the end of March.
“There are so many different properties and not just in a physical sense, but in a digital sense
that need to be rebranded,” he said. “We’re taking them one at a time. The new website will be launched and the old one will be decommissioned. Followed by our app. You will see (our) Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter pages be rebranded. The physical locations will take longer.”
Jay Sidhu, who founded Customers Bank in 2009 with a handful of investors, said it was time to update the company’s brand.
“The original Customers Bank brand with a red, white and blue theme and the American Flag as a centerpiece did very well for us,”
said Sidhu, who is presently Customers Bank executive chairman. “It clearly represented the American Dream and our emphasis on assisting the challengers, small business owners and entrepreneurs to punch above their weight class to achieve their financial and growth objectives. We will always hold American values, democracy, and heritage closely in our hearts. But as an emblem of a fintech-forward financial institution with a national reach, we need to signal markets, investors, and clients that we have a modern look, feel and discipline.”