Banks flush with cash as customers squirrel away money

Spring has come in like a lion, as in difficult conditions, for banks this year.

In early April, the target federal funds rate — the rate at which banks lend to each other, set by the Federal Reserve — was at 5%, higher than the near-zero level of a year earlier, making borrowing much more expensive. And even before the latest increase, Silicon Valley Bank made headlines after U.S. regulators shuttered it following a run on deposits. Then, on March 10, New York City-based Signature Bank failed, throwing the banking industry into a deeper crisis.

Will these events influence what Florida depositors choose to do with their money? We’ll see later this summer, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. updates its Deposit Market Share report. The report, which includes data as of June 30 for each year, shows how much each bank in Florida is holding in deposits. The report also shows how much each bank is holding outside Florida, elsewhere in the United States.

Some Florida bankers consider recent national events as noise, rather than a signal for massive shifts in money moves.

“It’s business as usual here,” says Eric Schreck, Florida regional president at Trustco Bank, which is headquartered in New York but manages about $1 billion in deposits in Florida. While true that a savings account might earn more in interest today than it did a year ago, he says Trustco is simply following the market. “Our rates today," he says, "are higher than they were three months ago, but so are pretty much everyone else’s."

It’s the same message from Angelie Spurling, regional president of business banking in Florida and Alabama at Valley National Bank.

“Growing deposits has always been in the playbook — it’s nothing new; it’s just part of what we do,” says Spurling, based in Tampa. And Valley won’t be chasing customers with higher yields for short-term gains. “The value proposition is service, and the fact that we’ve been in the community for a long time,” Spurling says.

If this year’s version of the report is indeed reflective of business as usual, it will show a gain in total deposits across Florida’s banks. Total deposits in the state were $878 billion in 2022, up from $808 billion in 2021 and $711 billion a year prior. That's a three-year gain of 23.48%. 

Per last summer’s report, more than half of all deposits in Florida financial institutions sat in four banks: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Truist and JPMorgan Chase. St. Petersburg-based Raymond James was fifth on the list at $38 billion, but with about half of Chase’s holdings.

See the tables below for additional details about the banks with the largest amounts of deposits in Florida, and the largest gainers from 2021 to 2022, in terms of dollar amounts. Deposit amounts, listed in thousands, are current as of June 30, 2022. The lists include all banks that added at least $300 million in deposits between June 2021 and 2022. 

Florida market share, baking deposits 

Note: Raymond James is based in St. Petersburg, whole SouthState, which merged with CenterState in 2020, is based in Winter Haven.

Source: Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Deposit Market Share

Year-over-year gains in Florida deposits