Leader Bank's branch in Cambridge's Central Square. Banker & Tradesman file photo
Leader Bank has added a second former First Republic Bank employee to its team focused on banking Greater Boston’s tech sector.
Leader’s president, Jay Tuli, said in an email that the bank was “excited” to have hired Alex Guinta, a five-year veteran of First Republic. Guinta will join Vitaly Schafer as a director in the $4.2 billion-asset bank’s tech and venture capital banking group.
Guinta held the title of “senior preferred banker” at First Republic, where he also served clients in the same space.
“We are proud to support founders and innovators in our economy as they pursue their entrepreneurial journey – a path that we have also been traversing since the Bank’s founding 20 years ago,” Tuli said.
The Boston Business Journal first reported the hire.
Arlington-based Leader’s growing innovation banking practice joins Cambridge Trust’s own, seven-year-old unit.
Leader announced its foray into banking the innovation sector in September with Schafer’s hiring. At the time, Tuli said his bank was hoping to offer local startups and VCs an alternative to Silicon Valley Bank – now owned by North Carolina giant First Citizens Bank – and JPMorgan Chase, which bought First Republic after its failure this spring.
Prior to the spring banking crisis, SVB and First Republic dominated the local market serving venture capitalists and small and medium-sized tech and biotech companies, but the crisis and resulting changes in ownership led some of those firms to move their primary banking relationships elsewhere. SVB’s Massachusetts deposits crashed from $5.5 billion on June 30, 2022 to $1.6 billion on June 30, 2023, according to FDIC statistics. JPMorgan Chase’s in-state deposits were $8.4 billion on June 30, substantially lower than the sum of its and First Republic’s combined $19.6 billion deposit total on June 30, 2023.
In response, First Citizens launched an ad campaign touting SVB’s continued presence in the market and embarked on a campaign of trying to win back clients via personal outreach.
During its’ third-quarter earnings call Oct. 26, First Citizens executives said those efforts were starting to bear fruit, with over 600 new SVB clients using one of the bank’s services and 50 in the “last couple” quarters forming much deeper relationships with SVB and what a bank executive told investment analysts was a reversal of “that perception that there’s a void and very much reinforcing that SVB is here and open for business.”
