PITTSBURGH—Bill Demchak surprised his friends when he decamped from a high-profile job at JPMorgan Chase for a job at a smaller bank more than two decades ago. Today, the PNC Financial Services Group CEO is determined to turn his bank into a trillion-dollar giant, reshaping the industry in the process.
On Monday, he took an early step toward that goal with a more than $4 billion acquisition of Colorado-based regional lender FirstBank, giving PNC a stronger foothold in the West. It still needs to roughly double in size to join the elite club of too-big-to-fail banks with at least $1 trillion in assets.
