By Erika Brown
When Citizens Private Bank decided to open its first office outside Boston, industry watchers assumed the bank would head west, toward the long-established “Ws” — Wellesley, Weston, Winchester, Wayland — the familiar suburban footprint loved by financial institutions.
Instead, Citizens chose Manchester, renovating the 2,000-square-foot Harbor’s Point space that once housed a brokerage firm into a modern, airy office overlooking the working harbor and Masconomo and Reed Parks. When it opened its doors in September, people immediately noticed its “un-bank like” feel: couches, coffee, local art, and sweeping views instead of glassed-in desks or a teller’s counter.
The design and feel is intentional.
“When you walk in, it shouldn’t feel like a bank,” says Executive Market Director John Packowski, who leads the new office and lives in Magnolia. “It should feel like a place where you can sit, take a breath, and talk through whatever’s happening in your financial life.”
A Different Kind of Expansion
Packowski has seen nearly every iteration of how wealth shifts across generations. He’s an industry veteran with more than 35 years working in private banking, starting at Boston Safe Deposit and Trust, then Boston Private Bank, and for the last 18 years at First Republic Bank.
Over time, he’s also watched the industry turn increasingly impersonal as it has consolidated into a handful of urban hubs. When Citizens, the 200-year-old Rhode Island retail banking giant, launched its private bank division two years ago as a standalone arm, it was countering that trend — offering the kind of high-touch model once defined by firms like Boston Private and First Republic.
The strategy? Recruit a team of veterans, like Packowski and his team, who’d worked together for decades. And let them go to work.
So far that strategy has succeeded. In just two years Citizens has opened private banking locations in Boston, New York, Palm Beach, and California, and has added $12.5 billion in personal and business deposits, $5.9 billion in personal and business loans and nearly $7.6 billion in private wealth management assets.
According to recent data published by Investopia, Massachusetts tops the nation in median household income — higher than any other state in the US. Perhaps due to this, the Citizens Private Bank’s Boston office in the Back Bay grew quickly. As talk of expansion took hold, Cape Ann stood out. The region remained underserved despite its deepening concentration of entrepreneurs, professional partnerships, real-estate investors, founder households, and nonprofit leaders.
“Cape Ann makes a lot of sense when you look at who lives here, and who is moving here,” says Regional Market Executive Mark Thompson, a North Shore native who has worked with Packowski for nearly two decades. “They run their businesses from here. They raise families here. They’re wealth creators, and they want their banking relationships rooted where they live.”
The Manchester team has seven full-time employees, six of whom have worked together before. Collectively, they represent 75 years in private banking.
Packowski wanted the office to feel genuinely tied to the community. Yes, Citizens partners with organizations serving a similar clientele, like LandVest or attorneys associated with family foundations and founders. But the local commitment is far more granular: weekly flowers from Lavender & Moss, events catered by Bravo or The Laughing Gull, art by Cape Ann painters (including several seascapes by Courtney Kelly of 35 Beach Studios & Gallery), and sponsorship of organizations like Essex County Greenbelt and community events such as September’s Fast Half Marathon.
What Clients Actually Need
Private banking is often assumed to be synonymous with high net worth and complexity. Packowski says that may be true—and, indeed, other private banks have a hard-and-fast total asset threshold for potential clients.
But that hard-and-fast view, he says, misses the point. Yes, all private banking starts with a focus on a type of client (read: a wealthy one), but the key, according to Packowski, is about flexing to distinct, and sometimes unusual, needs. These customers may be starting a business, facing a liquidity event, or succession, or divorce. They may be inheriting money (known in the biz as a “generational wealth transfer”), or they may be starting a philanthropy or foundation.
“We want to be there at the start of their ambitions and grow with them,” Thompson said, adding that a client’s net worth is just one data point. Sometimes, he said, it’s also about ambition, and where they’re going.
This idea of aligning with ambition fits with national trends, which show that most high-net-worth clients don’t earn W-2 (read: salaried) incomes. They live in a “K-1 world” of ownership and equity income, so their needs come in waves: buying or selling a home, launching a business, financing a practice buy-in, navigating a liquidity event, or planning for legacy and philanthropy.
Once these issues come into the picture, the idea of a single quarterback, a private banker who can handle their needs—mortgages, business or bridge loans, trust services, investment management, venture relationships, etc.—becomes important. And because of this, if they begin early, these relationships tend to persist and evolve, often over decades.
Who’s Driving the New Wealth?
Citizen’s choice to expand to Cape Ann aligns with a broader transition in American wealth. For much of the twentieth century, wealth was defined by generational trusts and inherited assets. That’s changing. Since the 1990s, the dominant force is found in first-generation wealth creators — entrepreneurs, founders, investors, and high-earning professionals who built fortunes through work and equity rather than inheritance.
According to research from Brookings and other national studies, roughly two-thirds of U.S. billionaires are self-made, and nearly eight in ten millionaires describe themselves the same way. These people see their wealth differently. For them, it’s something to use — to build companies, invest in their communities, or create a legacy — rather than something to sit on.
“They see their wealth as a tool,” Packowski says. “Whether it’s economic impact, community impact, or both, they want to do something with it.”
That mindset is especially visible on the North Shore, where many clients blend business ownership, family needs, real estate, philanthropy, and civic commitments. They are not looking for a banker to sell them a product. They want someone who understands the landscape of their lives and can help them think across decades.
At the same time, over the next 20 years, America will face a demographic tidal wave, a pivotal generational moment. Baby Boomers — the richest generation in U.S. history, holding roughly half of all household wealth — have begun passing assets to their heirs.
The industry is calling it “The Great Wealth Transfer,” which national studies estimate will spool out between $84 trillion and $124 trillion from Boomers to their heirs, much of it to Gen X and millennials who increasingly, especially post COVID, live outside of urban financial centers.
A Bet on Where Wealth Is Going
Packowski sees the North Shore as a long-term growth market for Citizens — a place where the bank’s New England heritage, paired with the scale of a Top 15 U.S. institution, has real value.
“We combine the best of both worlds,” he says. “Deep roots and real reach.”
Citizens’ decision to set up a standalone shop dedicated to private banking in Manchester is, in many ways, a bet on the future — on where wealth is living, how people are working, and what clients expect from their advisors. It reflects a move away from traditional financial hubs and toward smaller, community-anchored towns where wealth creators now live full-time.
For Packowski, it all comes back to the basics.
“People want real relationships,” he says. “They want someone who understands their life, their business, and their goals. And they want that person to be here.”
And by “here,” that’s Manchester. And that is exactly the point.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here