First Citizens Asset Management

First Citizens Asset Management

First Citizens Asset Management was formed in 2006 as a North Carolina-registered investment adviser, embedded within the broader First Citizens Bank framework. It shares a parent with a commercial banking franchise that traces its roots to 1898, but the asset management subsidiary is a distinctly twenty-first-century entity. The unit directs client capital rather than the bank's own treasury, with a mandate covering discretionary portfolio construction, retirement-income planning, and trust-administration overlays for the bank's private-wealth and institutional-trust clientele. Strategy skews toward traditional long-only public-market exposures delivered through the First Citizens family of mutual funds and individual separately managed accounts. The platform covers US equities, fixed income, and balanced multi-asset strategies, with additional capabilities in estate settlement and fiduciary trust services. Its geographic concentration mirrors the bank's branch network — dense across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, augmented by the western and mid-continent presence inherited through the 2022 CIT Group merger. That acquisition brought substantial new wealth-management relationships, forcing a larger integration of advisory platforms. The firm does not disclose total assets under management or advisor headcount. Its parent, First Citizens BancShares, reported approximately $220 billion in total assets as of early 2025, though those figures encompass commercial and retail banking assets, not discretionary wealth-management AUM alone. A registered investment adviser filing from 2023 indicates the entity's advisory personnel operate from the bank's headquarters location in Raleigh, with no separate global office footprint currently publicized. The 2022 CIT transaction, which closed in January of that year, remains the signature corporate event shaping the current operating posture, merging the bank's legacy wealth advisory group with the acquired CIT wealth management book. Structurally, First Citizens Asset Management is a bank-owned RIA — a category that carries different regulatory and incentive dynamics than independent trust companies or multi-family offices. Its integration within a publicly traded regional bank subjects it to Federal Reserve oversight and FDIC considerations, while limiting the kind of principal-investment activity and alternative-asset exposure common among stand-alone family offices. The platform's distribution is captive: advisory relationships flow through the bank's private-banking and trust-officer referral channel rather than through an open-architecture RIA marketplace, which constrains competition for mandates but makes scale entirely dependent on the commercial bank's organic relationship growth.