Nano Banc, a bank whose only branch was in Irvine, California, was closed on Friday, September 25, 2026, and that branch opened again on Monday, September 28, as a Sunwest Bank branch. The FDIC says Sunwest, based in Sandy, Utah, agreed to buy about $476 million of the failed bank’s $736 million in assets. Customers with deposits had nothing to do.
A Friday closing and a Monday opening
The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation closed Nano Banc and named the FDIC as receiver, according to the FDIC’s announcement. Sunwest agreed to take on nearly all of the deposits. The branch reopened Monday during normal business hours, three days after the closing.
People with money at Nano Banc automatically became Sunwest depositors, and the FDIC says their deposits stay insured. Over the weekend they could reach funds by writing checks or using ATM and debit cards. Checks drawn on Nano Banc continue to be processed, and people with loans there should keep making payments as usual.
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Questions go to the FDIC’s toll-free line, 1-866-314-1744. Hours in Pacific time ran Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. and Monday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., then weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The agency’s main site, fdic.gov, carries the failed-bank page for Nano Banc.
Three dollar figures, and what each one measures
The FDIC puts Nano Banc’s total assets at $736 million and its total deposits at $686 million, both as of June 30, 2026. Those are snapshots from before the failure. They describe the size of the bank, not what changed hands on closing weekend.
What changed hands is smaller. The FDIC says Sunwest agreed to buy about $476 million in assets, and the agency keeps the rest for later sale. Banking Dive reports Sunwest also assumed roughly $227 million in loans.
On deposits, Banking Dive reports Sunwest assumed about $605 million, against the $686 million the bank held in June. The FDIC describes the transfer as nearly all deposits, and its own totals are dated June 30, so the balance at closing may differ.
California’s regulator supplied a third asset number. It put Nano Banc’s assets at roughly $690 million at closure, Banking Dive reports, below the FDIC’s June figure. None of that changes what depositors were told: the money stayed insured and nothing needed to be filed.
The FDIC estimates the failure will cost its Deposit Insurance Fund about $114 million. That is a preliminary figure, and the agency says it may change as the assets it kept are sold. The estimate measures the fund’s loss on the failure, while the FDIC says customers’ deposits remain insured.
Where Nano Banc sits among 2026’s failures
Nano Banc is the sixth U.S. bank to fail in 2026 and the largest of them, Banking Dive reports. The count already exceeds every other year this decade: 2023 had five failures, 2020 four, 2024 and 2025 two each, and 2021 and 2022 none.
California’s regulator cited a deteriorating financial condition and a multi-year pattern of executive mismanagement and regulatory violations. In March it ordered Nano Banc to raise its tangible shareholder equity ratio to at least 9.5 percent or liquidate, sell or merge. The bank did none of those, and its equity later fell below the 3 percent statutory minimum.
Nano Banc reported a net loss of $75.3 million before the closure. In 2024 the Federal Reserve banned its former interim chief executive, Anthony Gressak III, and a former board member, James Chung, from banking over fraudulent pandemic-era loan applications.
July brought a much smaller failure with the same ending. Small Business Bank of Lenexa, Kansas, closed July 17 with $73 million in assets and about $69 million in deposits as of March 31, and its sole branch reopened Monday, July 20, as a Farmers State Bank branch. The FDIC put that cost at about $5.7 million.
The sequence matched: a Friday closing, a weekend of check and card access, a Monday reopening under a buyer. Nano Banc’s assets were roughly ten times the Kansas bank’s, and the estimated hit to the insurance fund was about twenty times larger, $114 million against $5.7 million.
The trouble was not new. The Federal Reserve and California’s regulator issued enforcement actions against Nano Banc in 2021, Banking Dive reports, and the Fed’s order focused on a heavy concentration in commercial real estate loans, insider lending and corporate expenses. The Fed ended its order in April 2025, five months before the bank closed.
Sunwest chief executive Carson Lappetito said the deal “reflects the financial strength, disciplined management, and stability that have defined Sunwest Bank for more than five decades.” The FDIC announcement itself carries no quotes from named officials.
For depositors, the FDIC’s instructions are short: nothing to file, nothing to sign, deposits insured. The announcement lists checks, ATM cards and debit cards as the weekend route to money and does not mention online banking or automatic payments, which leaves the first statement from Sunwest as the place to see whether regular deposits and bill payments arrived intact.
Did the account that moved arrive intact?
The FDIC’s guidance on Nano Banc covers the bank failing: deposits stay insured and nothing needs to be filed. It says nothing about a different risk, a creditor freezing or garnishing the balance, which a change of bank does not prevent.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit takes up that second question. It includes the 2-month bank protection rule and the frozen-account response, plus a debt inventory, call log and deadline tracker.
Get the 2-month bank protection rule and the frozen-account steps in one kit →
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
