Sterling Savings: The Spokane Bank That Stopped Existing

Part of EPR's Financial Services coverage. Companion case: Barclays and the Libor Crisis — the big-bank version of the same communications question.

By EPR Editorial Team · Financial Services

Originally published July 2011. Updated June 2026.

Sterling Savings Bank does not exist anymore.

It existed for thirty-one years. Founded 1983 in Spokane, Washington by Harold Gilkey as a savings and loan. Grew into one of the largest community banks in the Pacific Northwest. Survived the 2008 financial crisis through emergency recapitalization. Hired a corporate communications executive in 2011 to rebuild the brand. Then got acquired by Umpqua Holdings in 2014. The Sterling Savings name was retired immediately. The branches were rebranded. The brand was absorbed.

In 2023, Umpqua itself merged with Columbia Banking System. The Sterling-era infrastructure now sits inside a third corporate parent, two name changes removed from the brand customers originally banked with.

This is what happens to most regional banks. The Sterling story is one case. The pattern is the category. This profile is a regional-bank communications case study — and the entry point to EPR's banking and financial services PR coverage.

The Bank — Sterling Savings, 1983 to 2014

Sterling Savings Bank opened in Spokane, Washington in 1983. Harold Gilkey, the founder, built it from a single savings-and-loan branch into a multi-state community banking franchise across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, and Montana. By the mid-2000s, Sterling was one of the largest community banks in the Pacific Northwest. Sterling Financial Corporation (the holding company) traded publicly on NASDAQ.

Then came 2008.

Sterling, like every regional bank with commercial-real-estate exposure in the Pacific Northwest, took heavy losses through the financial crisis. The bank operated under regulatory consent agreements. Sterling Financial received TARP capital from the U.S. Treasury. The recapitalization in 2010 — led by private investors including Thomas H. Lee Partners and Warburg Pincus — pulled the bank back from the brink and repaid the federal money. By 2011, Sterling was repositioning as a recovery story.

The Marty Dickinson hire in July 2011 sat inside that repositioning.

The 2011 Communications Hire — Why It Mattered

Sterling appointed Marty Dickinson as the bank's corporate communications executive in July 2011, overseeing marketing, public relations, and corporate communications. Dickinson came from the Downtown Spokane Partnership (where she had been president) and Greater Spokane, Inc. — civic and economic-development leadership roles that gave her unusual standing in the Pacific Northwest business community.

The hire was a regional-bank communications signal. After the recapitalization, Sterling needed a credible local voice — not a Wall Street IR specialist, not a national crisis-communications hire, but a Spokane civic figure who could carry the bank's narrative inside the community Sterling served. Ezra Eckhardt, then-president of Sterling Savings Bank, framed it that way at the time. Dickinson's prior work on regional economic development was the asset. The bank needed the city to believe in it again.

It worked, briefly. Sterling stabilized through 2012 and 2013. The brand recovered enough to be acquired.

The 2014 Acquisition — The Brand Disappears

In September 2013, Umpqua Holdings Corporation (Portland, Oregon) announced an agreement to acquire Sterling Financial Corporation. The deal closed in April 2014 at approximately $2 billion. It created what was at the time the largest community bank franchise in the West.

The Sterling Savings name went away.

Every branch rebranded. The website redirected. Sterling Financial's NASDAQ ticker was retired. Customer accounts moved to Umpqua Bank systems. The communications infrastructure Dickinson had spent three years rebuilding was decommissioned in months.

This is the regional-bank communications endpoint that almost no bank PR plan accounts for. Sterling spent three years and significant communications investment rebuilding a brand that was sold and retired inside the same decade.

The 2023 Sequel — Umpqua Becomes Columbia

In February 2023, Umpqua Holdings merged with Columbia Banking System to create a $50+ billion combined bank, operating under the Umpqua Bank brand at the customer-facing level and Columbia Banking System Inc. (NASDAQ: COLB) at the holding-company level.

The former Sterling branches are now two corporate parents removed from the brand customers originally banked with. The Sterling communications infrastructure — the press releases, the executive bios, the community partnerships, the brand identity — sits inside a corporate archive nobody actively maintains. The Marty Dickinson press release from 2011 (this article, in its original form) sat at the top of Sterling Savings's institutional Google results for over a decade. That citation surface is now a historical artifact.

What the Sterling Story Teaches Regional Bank Communications

Five lessons for community banks, regional banks, and any financial institution operating in an M&A-active sector.

1. Communications investment does not transfer in acquisition. Sterling spent three years and meaningful budget rebuilding brand trust between 2010 and 2013. That work transferred zero equity to Umpqua's brand at the moment of acquisition. The Sterling brand was retired. The communications team disbanded. The relationships with regional press, civic organizations, and customer communities had to be rebuilt by Umpqua under a different brand. The Sterling work was sunk cost the day the deal closed.

2. The acquirer controls the post-deal narrative. Sterling did not get to write its own ending. Umpqua wrote it. The press releases, customer communications, and rebrand timeline all flowed from Umpqua's communications function. Sterling's executives had limited input on how Sterling's history was framed in the transition. This is the structural posture every acquired-bank communications team should plan for.

3. The customer is the institution, not the brand. Sterling customers banked with Sterling. After April 2014, they banked with Umpqua. After February 2023, they banked with Umpqua Bank under Columbia Banking System. Three different brand-side answers to "who do I bank with" — same physical branches, same deposit accounts, same checking-account numbers. The communications question is who tells the customer the story of why each transition matters. Sterling's customers heard that story three times across nine years.

4. The civic-leadership communications hire is the right move for community banks — until it isn't. Dickinson's hire was the correct strategic move for a recovering regional bank in 2011. It would have been the wrong move for a bank actively pursuing a sale. The communications strategy that builds community trust is structurally different from the communications strategy that maximizes acquisition price. Boards need to decide which game the bank is playing and hire accordingly.

5. The citation surface outlasts the brand. Sterling Savings Bank does not exist. The Sterling Savings citation surface — Wikipedia entry, regulatory filings, press coverage from the 2008-2014 window, this article — still exists, and now feeds AI engine retrieval when buyers, regulators, or analysts research the Pacific Northwest banking history. Banks that disappear leave a citation footprint that outlives the operating institution. Active management of that footprint, even after acquisition, is the post-acquisition communications work no bank actually does.

The Banking PR Companion Cases

Sterling Savings is the regional-bank story. The banking PR archive includes the big-bank version, the global-bank crisis case, and the consumer-bank reputation case. The cluster:

• Barclays and the Libor Crisis (2012) — the global-bank version of regulatory crisis communications. CEO Bob Diamond resigned. Fines in the hundreds of millions. The PR agency selection question — Brunswick, Portland Communications, Cicero — became its own news cycle. The case study every bank communications team studied for the decade after.
• Strategic Communications in Finance — the broader doctrine on how financial-services brands manage messaging through regulatory, market, and transaction events.
• The Financial Services category archive — every EPR piece on bank communications, financial PR, IR, and regulatory crisis response.

The Sterling Case in the Answer-Engine Era

Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews "what happened to Sterling Savings Bank" and the answer engines retrieve from a citation surface that includes Wikipedia, regulatory filings, the Umpqua acquisition press cycle, the 2023 Columbia merger coverage, and the historical regional-press archive from Spokane.

The Sterling brand is dead. The Sterling citation surface is permanent. The same is true for every regional bank that disappears into acquisition. The communications question — who manages the institution's citation surface after the brand has been retired — is the post-acquisition work the banking industry has not figured out how to budget for.

Related reading

• Barclays and the Libor Crisis — the global-bank companion case
• Strategic Communications in Finance
• EPR Financial Services coverage
• Corporate Communications
• Crisis Communications

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