First Republic Bank
First Republic Bank was a San Francisco-headquartered regional commercial bank established on July 1, 1985, that specialized in providing customized deposit, lending, and wealth management services primarily to high-net-worth individuals and businesses.[1] The institution grew rapidly over decades by cultivating client loyalty through personalized, high-touch service and competitive interest rates on large uninsured deposits, amassing total assets of $232.9 billion and deposits of $104.5 billion as of March 31, 2023, with the majority of deposits exceeding federal insurance limits.[2] Its business model emphasized relationship banking in affluent markets across major U.S. cities, but this reliance on jumbo, uninsured funding sources exposed it to liquidity vulnerabilities during periods of market stress.[2] In early 2023, amid contagion from the failures of other regional banks like Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic experienced a massive deposit run as clients withdrew over $100 billion in funds, eroding its liquidity and revealing substantial unrealized losses on its portfolio of long-term securities purchased in a low-interest-rate environment.[3] Regulators closed the bank on May 1, 2023, appointing the FDIC as receiver; the agency facilitated its sale to JPMorgan Chase, which assumed all deposits and substantially all assets, resulting in an estimated $15.6 billion loss to the Deposit Insurance Fund and marking First Republic as the second-largest U.S. bank failure by asset size in history.[4][5] The episode underscored the risks of concentrated uninsured deposit bases and inadequate interest rate risk management in a rising-rate regime, prompting regulatory scrutiny of supervisory practices that had rated the bank's liquidity as strong prior to the crisis.[2][3]