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Sam Sidhu

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

CEO of Customers Bancorp since January 1, 2026 and president and CEO of Customers Bank; led the bank's PPP lending. Customers entered a Federal Reserve written agreement in August 2024 over digital-asset and BSA/AML compliance, not PPP.

Identity and role

Samvir S. "Sam" Sidhu is president and CEO of Customers Bank and, since January 1, 2026, CEO of its holding company, Customers Bancorp (NYSE: CUBI), where he is also president and vice chairman. He is the son of Jay Sidhu, the company's founder and now Executive Chairman. Sam Sidhu ran Customers Bank's Paycheck Protection Program operation.

Biography / career arc

Sidhu holds a bachelor's degree from the Wharton School and an MBA from Harvard Business School; he worked at Goldman Sachs and Providence Equity Partners and founded Megalith Capital Management and Megalith Financial Acquisition Corp (Customers IR biography; the years and the SPAC's $170 million IPO figure are cited to the S-1/A, whose capture is an SEC rate-limit page). That SPAC merged with BankMobile, the digital bank spun out of his father's Customers Bancorp, to form BM Technologies in January 2021; his sister Luvleen Sidhu ran BM Technologies as CEO. He has served on Customers Bank's board since 2012.

The company and its PPP/EIDL role

Sidhu joined Customers full-time in January 2020 as chief operating officer and vice chairman of the bank and head of corporate development at the holding company. He became president and CEO of Customers Bank effective July 1, 2021, succeeding the retiring bank president Dick Ehst; his father remained chairman and CEO of the parent until the start of 2026.

Per SBA PPP loan-level data, Customers Bank originated 249,661 PPP loans worth $6.33 billion as lender of record; its aggregate including the white-label partner channel was higher (Banking Dive). The white-label channel ran on technology Sidhu's team built near the end of PPP's first round, then sold as an end-to-end "white-label" service to more than 300 other banks, credit unions and CDFIs (Banking Dive, Feb. 4, 2021). "It's very difficult to build what we built," he told Banking Dive in February 2021. "We thought that this would resonate well with other banks and we were right." He said "we have superior technology to almost any bank that we would be considered a peer of" and that the program took the bank from 4,000 commercial customers to 106,000.

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Sam Sidhu personally is established in the public record.

Sidhu has not been charged with or named individually in any enforcement action.

The 2024 Federal Reserve and Pennsylvania written agreement. On August 8, 2024, the Federal Reserve (with the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities) entered a written agreement with Customers Bancorp and Customers Bank citing "significant deficiencies" in risk management and Bank Secrecy Act / anti-money-laundering and OFAC compliance, tied to the bank's digital-asset strategy and its tokenized-payments platform. Sidhu was the bank's CEO at the time. The agreement does not concern PPP. In an August 2025 interview he described the remediation in operational terms: the bank added about three dozen risk and compliance staff, hired a new chief risk officer from Capital One, and spent an estimated $10 million to $15 million addressing the order's issues. "I think it's safe to say our regulators' bar was higher than our bar last year," he said. "Our bar is higher than our regulators' bar this year."

Securities class action. A CUBI shareholder suit followed the 2024 announcement (Robbins Geller case page cited; its capture is a stub, so the defendant list — Customers Bancorp, Jay Sidhu and the former CFO, without Sam Sidhu — rests on that page; we do not have a copy). Those are allegations in private litigation, not findings, and they concern the AML matter, not PPP.

No personal regulatory action, consent order, or individual lawsuit against Sam Sidhu was found in the public record.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Sidhu became CEO of Customers Bancorp on January 1, 2026, completing the succession announced in July 2025; he keeps the president and CEO titles at the bank. Customers Bancorp reported total assets of $26.5 billion at June 30, 2026. In April 2026 Customers announced a multiyear partnership with OpenAI to embed engineers and automate lending and onboarding, with Sidhu targeting an improvement in the bank's efficiency ratio (CNBC). The bank continues to run its tokenized-payments business and reported moving roughly $1.5 trillion in digital-asset-related payments volume in 2024.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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