Stuck just outside the Too-Big-To-Fail Club, PNC is keen to join, and urged regulators to ensure there’s healthy competition among lenders.

“Our deposit base isn’t as big as it needs to be to go head-to-head with the megabanks,” Mark Wiedman, president of the Pittsburgh-based bank — the nation’s sixth-largest — said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday.

That was the rationale for PNC’s purchase of a Colorado bank last month, a step toward its goal of building the first new coast-to-coast bank since the 1990s wave of consolidation that produced Bank of America.

Wiedman said it’s less about reaching an absolute size — though $1 trillion in assets is “a bogey that helps crystallize” its ambitions — and more about having a national network of branches, partly to keep customers who move from one city to another. Most of that growth will come from building new branches, he said, but takeovers will fill in geographic gaps, too: PNC has been on the hunt since 2023, when it was shut out of the bidding for failed First Republic, which was sold in a fire sale to JPMorgan.

“That was annoying. Through a lack of forethought by the policymakers, we allowed a dominant bank to get even more dominant,” Wiedman said. “Do we want a couple of megabanks to just keep getting larger and larger?”

Wiedman also said the use of stablecoins for banks is “pretty limited” because the rails for instant payments already exist. What’s required is to turn them on for instant payments — but “that would undermine certain incumbent revenue streams, because what do you do if you can’t [send a payment]? You use your credit card.”