EverBank Opens Two New Branches in Los Angeles County

EverBank has opened two new branches in Los Angeles County, planting flags in Santa Monica and Westlake Village as the Jacksonville-based bank pushes deeper into the California market.

The openings bring EverBank’s L.A. County total to seven retail branches and its national footprint to 41 locations across California, Florida, and New York. For a bank that started life nearly 30 years ago as an online-only lender, the westward march into physical storefronts represents a deliberate and data-driven bet on what a branch can actually do for a digital business.

Patrick Nygren, senior vice president and head of retail banking at EverBank, said the choice of neighborhoods isn’t random. “We see a really strategic and unique opportunity to tap the very large deposit bases that sit within these communities,” Nygren told the LA Business Journal. His office is in Thousand Oaks, which puts him squarely in the corridor these new branches are meant to serve.

The Santa Monica location sits at 1630 Montana Ave. The Westlake Village branch is at 971 S. Westlake Blvd. Branch manager Ashley Shirinian leads the Santa Monica team, while Daniel Estrada runs operations in Westlake Village. Both locations offer consumer and commercial banking products, with high-yield savings accounts as EverBank’s signature draw.

What makes EverBank’s expansion strategy worth watching is the methodology behind it. New locations aren’t chosen by foot traffic or demographics alone. The bank maps concentrations of existing digital clients in a given area, then opens a branch to convert those online-only relationships into fuller banking partnerships. The Encino branch, which opened in 2024 as the bank’s first West Coast outpost, produced a 20% lift in digital growth within a 15-mile radius after it launched. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the model.

“In the first 60 to 90 days, it’s really targeted, and we’re very specific on engaging our existing customer base to earn more wallet share,” Nygren said. “Then, we start to actively market for new clients.”

The deposit math is striking. Once a physical branch opens near an existing digital customer, EverBank typically sees two-and-a-half times the deposit growth from that customer base. Fewer branches mean lower overhead, and lower overhead means the bank can keep savings rates competitive. “We’re known and committed to being a top rate payer in market,” Nygren said. “We want to ensure that we are really investing in our clients as they’re investing in us.”

Branch-light.

That phrase captures the bank’s posture. EverBank isn’t trying to match JPMorgan Chase corner for corner or build a presence at every strip mall in the San Fernando Valley. Seven branches across all of L.A. County is a thin footprint by traditional retail banking standards, but it’s precisely that restraint that EverBank says keeps its high-yield savings rates above what branch-heavy competitors can offer.

EverBank manages $46 billion in assets and $37 billion in deposits as of December 31. Those numbers frame a bank that is large enough to compete aggressively on rates but still small enough relative to the national megabanks that it needs to pick its markets carefully. The acquisition of Sterling Bank & Trust’s 25 California-based branches last April gave EverBank an immediate distribution network that would have taken years to build organically. The two new openings this month build on that foundation.

The Santa Monica and Westlake Village neighborhoods fit a pattern. Both carry concentrations of affluent households with meaningful deposit potential, exactly the kind of community the bank’s digital analytics flag as high-value targets before a branch ever opens. The FDIC’s summary of deposits data shows Los Angeles County as one of the deepest deposit markets in the country, and EverBank is clearly reading that data the same way the big players do, just acting on it more surgically.

Whether a 41-branch national bank can build lasting brand loyalty in a market this competitive against institutions with decades of local history is a question the deposit numbers will eventually answer. What EverBank has going for it right now is a clean value proposition: a savings rate that beats most of its neighbors on the block, a digital infrastructure that most community banks don’t have, and a physical presence just substantial enough to make customers feel there’s someone to call. Nygren and his teams in Santa Monica and Westlake Village are betting that combination is enough to pry deposit dollars away from institutions that have held them for years.