(Reuters) – Customers Bancorp said on Friday it acquired a $631 million venture banking loan portfolio from the U.S. banking regulator Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) at about 85% of the book value.
The bank is buying the portfolio from failed lender Signature Bank, which was put under the FDIC’s receivership in March, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Shares of Customers Bancorp rose about 2.5% to $30 in morning trading.
The FDIC did not immediately respond to a Reuters query on whose loan portfolio Customers Bancorp had acquired from the regulator.
Customers Bancorp has also recruited 30 team members from the group that originated these loans, who will help expand the bank’s venture banking client coverage in major cities including Austin, Boston, Southern California and Chicago.
On March 12, state regulators closed New York-based Signature Bank, marking the second high-profile collapse of the year after a bank run at the lender saw spooked depositors flee to larger ‘too-big-to-fail’ Wall Street titans.
Later that month, New York Community Bancorp entered into an agreement with the FDIC to buy substantially all deposits and certain loan portfolios, and all 40 of Signature Bank’s former branches.
Following the bank’s closure, the FDIC had announced in April the marketing process for the about $60-billion loan portfolio retained in receivership from Signature Bank.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Saeed Azhar in New York; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
