While Westfield was established 24 years ago as part of a diversification effort by Westfield Insurance, that strategy no longer feels as necessary today.
Several challenges were unfolding in the property and casualty space around the early aughts, including immense pricing pressures and high underwriting losses.
At the same time, the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999 opened up avenues for the formation of financial holding companies that could simultaneously operate insurance, banking and securities firms under one umbrella.
So, as companies like Westfield looked to grow, launching a bank from scratch to support the insurance side of the business seemed like a good strategy.
That’s when the idea for Westfield Bank was born.
“If you go back in time to the late 1990s, banking was a very attractive, high-double-digit, almost 20% (return on equity) business,” said Joe Kohmann, chief operating officer for Westfield Insurance and the second-ever employee of Westfield Bank. “There was a massive trend of insurance companies and banks joining up and competing together. So we were part of that environment and approach to create a diversification to complement the property and casualty business.”
Part of the idea was that a banking subsidiary might present opportunities to cross-sell insurance services to banking customers and vice versa.
“What we found out very quickly was that (it) was just not a working strategy,” Kohmann said. “The products didn’t blend well together. The distribution didn’t blend well together. So we pivoted early on to start to focus on insurance agencies as a customer segment.”
That strategy pivot proved useful. In the years since its inception, Westfield Bank managed to grow from zero to $2.2 billion in assets, nearly $1.9 billion in deposits and seven Northeast Ohio branches.
Fred Cummings, president of Elizabeth Park Capital Management, has praised Westfield as a “very clean bank.”
But that strategic pivot for the bank itself early on in its life also shaped its identity in terms of operating more independently from its sister insurance business with its own leaders and board of directors. After many years, the banking business’s support to the insurance side became less important.
“Over time, literally everything else that we did from a diversification strategy played out OK or not OK,” said Ed Largent, CEO and board chair for Westfield Insurance, “and really the bank was the shining star and the success story for that period of Westfield.”
While the bank has proven successful, as of 2025, Ohio Farmers Insurance Co. — the parent of both Westfield Bank and Westfield Insurance — decided to divest the business, freeing it up to focus exclusively on insurance.
Surfacing as the winning bidder is First Financial Bancorp (Nasdaq: FFBC), the Cincinnati-based parent of First Financial Bank, which on June 25 announced a $325 million cash-and-stock deal to acquire the bank.
The deal will significantly grow First Financial’s presence in the Northeast Ohio marketplace. As the transaction closes later this year, the company stands to grow to approximately $20.6 billion in banking assets and more than $16 billion in deposits with a solid base of operations in the region.
“We’re disappointed to lose the bank and the tremendous success that it brought, but we are really excited about the partner we found for them,” said Kohmann. “They can move forward focused on banking. And we can move forward focused on insurance. And we’ll hopefully continue to be successful in doing that.”
“This was really an opportunity for us to do two things,” Kohmann said. “One is to really increase our focus completely and entirely on property and casualty insurance and secondly really to move away from being a bank holding company and some of the regulatory pressures and uncertainties that come along with that, which could be a distraction from a property and casualty standpoint.”
The intended use of the Westfield Insurance proceeds from the bank sale is not immediately clear. After all, the deal isn’t expected to close for several months. Plus, Largent said the company is still digesting some of the growth it’s achieved in recent years.
In 2023, for example, Westfield completed an expansion into the international specialty insurance market with the acquisition of Lloyd’s of London Syndicate 1200.
“We’ve had our sights set on the international specialty market since launching our specialty business a year ago, so this is Westfield executing on our original strategy,” said Westfield Specialty President Jack Kuhn at the time. “We considered multiple pathways but acquiring Syndicate 1200 emerged as a unique opportunity because it gets us into the international specialty market quickly with an established platform while capitalizing on current market dynamics.”
More recently, Largent said Westfield has gone through a “massive expansion” with its U.S. specialty and international specialty businesses that has added about $2 billion in revenue to the portfolio, which he said should grow to about $4.5 billion this year.
So how the company plans to invest capital from the bank deal is to be determined. But, to be sure, the idea is to further support growth.
“We are in the process of starting an EU-based insurance entity in Luxembourg, and that will be another growth opportunity,” Largent said. “We see opportunities for this business and will continue to invest, though there’s nothing specific or grandiose on the strategy map this second.”
