City National adds ten private bankers in California

City National Bank has added 10 private bankers across Los Angeles, Orange County and the Bay Area, the field-level close to a rebuild that began last year in the executive suite rather than in the field. The bankers report to Stephen M. Sherline, who joined in August as co-head of City National Private Bank and head of the Western Region.

Brandon Williams took over as EVP and head of Private Bank & Wealth Management in September 2025 after serving on an interim basis, and the bank has since added Darcy Roennfeldt as head of Trust & Estate Services and Shannon Patterson as co-head of the private bank and head of the Eastern Region. City National, the Royal Bank of Canada subsidiary, says the new officers bring experience across private banking, wealth management, commercial lending, trust and estate services and client advisory, and will serve high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, multigenerational families, business owners and nonprofit leaders. Sherline said California's wealthy population has grown remarkably in recent decades, and the bank's pitch is that boutique service plus a large parent balance sheet gives it room against rivals.

The order matters. City National filled the top seats first — Williams, then Roennfeldt and Patterson, then Sherline — and only after that hired the revenue producers, a sequence that suggests a bank trying to compress its rebuilding timeline. That fits a pattern PWD has argued now defines the talent war: hiring is no longer mainly about wirehouse breakaways, but about banks and platforms building benches in competition with independent RIAs. For a California private bank, the competitive field includes RIAs that can offer equity and control; a bank that wants to keep its share of the state's wealthy families has to show production momentum, not just headcount.

Ten bankers is a meaningful addition, but the test is whether the group arrives with client relationships that move production, and that will show up in City National's California results rather than in a hiring announcement. For Sherline, it is an early test of his Western region build-out; for rivals, it is a reminder that the bank channel is recruiting against RIAs with a parent balance sheet behind it.