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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. As the bank's chief operating officer he built the fintech and white-label channel behind 249,661 PPP loans worth $6.33 billion, and received PPP stock options valued at $3.1 million. He has not been charged or named in any enforcement action.

In the archive

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.

Career

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, a blank-check company (Customers biography; Megalith Form S-1/A, 2018). Megalith merged with BankMobile, the digital bank spun out of Customers, to form BM Technologies in January 2021; his sister Luvleen Sidhu ran it as CEO. He has sat on Customers Bank's board since 2012.

He 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 the bank on July 1, 2021, succeeding the retiring Dick Ehst (American Banker).

Pandemic-relief role

Customers built a PPP business out of other people's customers. Its January 12, 2021 release says fintechs had marketing and technology but lacked underwriting capacity and capital, so "Customers Bank Vice Chair Sam Sidhu engineered a hybrid bank-fintech partnership." Kabbage was the partner named in the record: the House Select Subcommittee's December 2022 report lists Customers as one of Kabbage's two round-one banks. Kabbage's bankruptcy disclosure statement records a Customers channel of about $2.6 billion with about $65 million in associated fees. For 2021 Customers sold the platform to other lenders as a white-label product. "The customer will not know it isn't their bank until late in the process," Sam Sidhu said in the release.

SBA's loan data credit Customers Bank with 249,661 PPP loans worth $6.33 billion as originating lender. The company's own counts run higher: its July 28, 2021 release says Customers "made more than 320,000 PPP loans with an aggregate value of $9.6 billion." The 2022 proxy gave about 358,000 worth $10.3 billion funded "directly or indirectly": "more PPP loans than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC." The Fed funded much of the book; Customers' PPP Liquidity Facility balance peaked at $4.81 billion. Customers also became servicer for other lenders' PPP loans, including 21,336 made by WebBank and 32,926 made by Ready Capital's lending unit.

The fees came in above plan. In July 2020 Customers told investors PPP would "add about $100 million in origination revenues." The 2022 proxy reported "close to $350 million of deferred origination fees from the SBA," which it called "close to 8 times higher" than first expected. Its 10-Ks report PPP interest income, including net fees, of $424.1 million for 2020 through 2022. In February 2021 the compensation committee gave five executives one-time PPP awards worth $5.2 million, "approximately 1.5% of the total deferred fees earned from the PPP loans." Jay Sidhu took $1,250,000 in cash, and Sam Sidhu, whom the 2021 10-K credits with the fintech partnerships, received 250,000 stock options valued at $3,116,421.

Sam Sidhu described the result to Banking Dive in February 2021. "It's very difficult to build what we built," he said. "We thought that this would resonate well with other banks and we were right." The program, he said, took the bank from 4,000 commercial customers to 106,000.

Their own relief

We found no PPP or EIDL loan to Sam Sidhu personally.

Sam Sidhu has not been charged with a crime and is not named in any enforcement action or in the securities suit below.

PPP oversight. After the House Select Subcommittee's fintech report, SBA named Customers on December 9, 2022 among eight PPP partner lenders it would investigate. We found no charge, False Claims Act settlement or Inspector General finding about Customers' PPP lending. Customers' 10-K filed in February 2022 lists among its risk factors that its fast PPP lending "may present potential fraud risk."

The 2024 written agreement. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia entered a written agreement with Customers Bancorp and Customers Bank, dated August 5, 2024 and announced August 8. It followed examinations that "identified significant deficiencies" in risk management and in compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering rules and OFAC regulations. The findings concern the bank's digital-asset customers and its instant-payments platform, not PPP. The Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities issued a consent order the same day. Customers' 10-K for 2025, filed February 27, 2026, does not report either as lifted.

The securities suit. Chang v. Customers Bancorp, E.D. Pa. No. 2:24-cv-06416, named Customers Bancorp, Jay Sidhu and former CFO Carla Leibold, and alleged they failed to disclose the weak controls. The court denied the only movant appointment as lead plaintiff on June 24, 2025, and the case was voluntarily dismissed on October 28, 2025, without a ruling on the merits.

Sidhu was the bank's CEO when the agreement was signed. In an August 2025 interview he said the bank had added about three dozen risk and compliance staff and hired a chief risk officer from Capital One. He put the cost of addressing the order's issues at an estimated $10 million to $15 million. "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."

Since 2025

Sidhu became CEO of Customers Bancorp on January 1, 2026, completing a succession announced in July 2025. Customers Bancorp reported total assets of $26.5 billion at June 30, 2026. In April 2026 it announced a multiyear partnership with OpenAI to embed engineers and automate lending and onboarding (CNBC).

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