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Jay Sidhu

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Founder and executive chairman of Customers Bancorp, one of the larger PPP lenders; previously built Sovereign Bancorp. Customers entered a Federal Reserve written agreement in August 2024 over digital-asset and BSA/AML compliance, not PPP.

In the archive

Identity and role

Jay S. Sidhu is the founder and, since January 1, 2026, Executive Chairman of Customers Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE: CUBI), the holding company for Customers Bank in West Reading, Pennsylvania. He ran the company as chairman and CEO from 2009 until the start of 2026, when he handed the chief-executive title to his son, Sam Sidhu. Before Customers he spent seventeen years as chairman and CEO of Sovereign Bancorp, and along the way he launched the digital bank BankMobile.

Biography / career arc

Sidhu was born in 1951 near Bamala, in Punjab, India. He emigrated to the United States in 1971, earned an MBA from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, and completed Harvard Business School's executive leadership course. Wilkes later named its business school, the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business and Leadership, after him, and he has chaired its board of trustees. (His undergraduate degree in India is not named in the public bio.)

From 1989 to 2006 he was chairman and CEO of Sovereign Bancorp and Sovereign Bank, which he grew from a roughly $12 million IPO into an approximately $90 billion-asset institution, at its peak the 17th-largest bank in the United States. Between Sovereign and his next act he led an investment in Florida's Atlantic Coast Financial (American Banker); the Sidhu Advisors and $150 million blank-check lines are not in any copy we have.

The company and its PPP/EIDL role

In 2009 Sidhu raised about $13.6 million to take a controlling stake in the troubled New Century Bank, a five-branch institution in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (American Banker); within a month he was its CEO. He renamed it Customers Bancorp and built it into a bank with more than $22 billion in assets by 2025 (Business Wire). BankMobile, the digital bank he launched with his daughter Luvleen Sidhu, was spun off in January 2021 as BM Technologies (NYSE American: BMTX) through a merger with Megalith Financial Acquisition Corp. (GlobeNewswire); the 2015 launch, "first no-fee digital bank" billing and 2016 Higher One acquisition are cited to no source we have a copy of.

Per SBA loan-level data, Customers originated 249,661 PPP loans worth $6.33 billion as the named lender of record. Its aggregate volume including the white-label partner channel was higher (Banking Dive), because Customers built its own PPP technology platform and offered it to more than 300 other banks, credit unions and CDFIs (Banking Dive). The public face of that effort was Sam Sidhu, then the bank's chief operating officer and later its CEO; Jay Sidhu's role was the chairman-and-CEO of the parent overseeing the strategy. Sam Sidhu told Banking Dive in February 2021 that the bank had "4,000 commercial customers" before PPP and "106,000 with PPP."

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Jay Sidhu personally, or to Customers Bancorp as a borrower, is established in the public record.

The 2024 Federal Reserve and Pennsylvania written agreement. On August 8, 2024, the Federal Reserve announced a written agreement (executed August 5) with Customers Bancorp and Customers Bank, paired with a parallel consent order from the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities. The agreement records that the Fed's examinations "identified significant deficiencies" in the bank's risk management and its compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, including the Bank Secrecy Act, and OFAC regulations, tied to the bank's digital-asset strategy (written agreement).

A related securities class action followed the announcement (Rosen Law Firm notice); the defendants, the stock-drop figure and the allegations previously listed here are not in that capture. Those are allegations in private litigation, not findings.

He left Sovereign in 2006 (American Banker; Customers IR biography).

No personal SEC enforcement action or regulatory bar against Jay Sidhu is documented in the public record. No PPP-specific enforcement action or lawsuit against Customers Bank was found.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Sidhu became Executive Chairman of Customers Bancorp on January 1, 2026, ending his run as CEO of the holding company; the succession had been announced in July 2025, with Sam Sidhu taking over as Bancorp CEO. At the handoff the company described its growth "from a distressed bank with approximately $200 million in assets to over $22 billion."

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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