IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
Ontario-based Citizens Business Bank has opened a bank in Santa Barbara, continuing the financial institution’s move into the Santa Barbara County-Ventura County market it began nearly one year ago.
The new branch, which opened Jan. 11, employs four people and is being led by Phil Morreale, senior vice president with the company, according to a statement released Tuesday.
Last March, Citizens Business Bank opened a branch bank in Oxnard. Seven months later, it announced it had merged with County Commerce Bank, which operates four branch banks in Ventura County.
That merger is expected to close this quarter.
The Central Coast market is a good fit for Citizens Business Bank, said Christopher D. Myers, the bank’s president and chief executive officer.
“It’s a strong community, it has a lot of non-profits and it’s affluent,” Myers said. “We’ll have six banks in that market after the merger, and we might consider putting more there. We might look at that this year.”
Citizens Business Bank’s holding company is CVB Financial Corp., which has $7.6 billion in assets and is the ninth-largest bank with its headquarters in California. CVB Financial was recently ranked “Best Bank in America” in Forbes magazine’s “America’s Best Banks 2016.”
