River City Bank: First Look

A deeper look at a $5 billion family run California bank.

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Disclosures: None

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River City Bank History

A Natural Next Step

River City Bank founder Jon Kelly grew up around his father’s broadcast radio station in Sacramento. When his father died early, Jon and his brother Bob took over the family business and soon expanded into broadcast television, operating a successful NBC affiliate station, KCRA.

Jon next started a Zenith TV distributor to put TVs in the homes of area residents and erected a transmission tower to carry the station’s signals. Jon also had the bold idea of acquiring a multi-million dollar helicopter to report on traffic. These ambitions required capital, and Jon saw that the Sacramento area lacked a strong, locally owned bank to grow businesses like his.

With $1 million of seed capital, Jon and local businessmen formed River City Bank in 1973. The bank brought in $1.5 million in its first 30 days. Jon continued to operate his other business interests while remaining intimately involved with the bank.

River City Bank founder, Jon Kelly. Source: River City Bank website.

Passing the Reins

In the mid-2000s, Jon began gifting shares of the bank to his daughter, Shawn Devlin, whom he installed as board chair and who currently owns 34% of the bank. This wasn’t a case of nepotism, as Shawn had gravitated to finance and worked in various roles within Citibank and Mellon Bank after earning a business degree from the University of San Francisco. Jon encouraged his daughter to get a wide range of business experience and make mistakes elsewhere before nudging her to lead River City. She wasn’t entirely new to the bank either, having served on an advisory board in her 20s and as a director of the bank in her mid-30s.

One of Shawn’s first tasks was to bring in an operator, whom she found in Steve Fleming, an accomplished banker who had banked Jon during his time at Bank of America. By all accounts, Devlin and Fleming have a solid working relationship built on trust and mutual respect (see this 2023 joint podcast interview). Their relationship included mutual respect for and consultation with Jon Kelly until he died in 2020.

Fleming joined the bank in 2008, and in 2009, the bank’s assets topped $1 billion. In 2023, the bank’s 50th year in operation, assets amounted to $4.9 billion, and as of Q2-2025, assets reached $5.3 billion, and shareholders’ equity topped $500 million for the first time.

Shawn’s nephew and Jon Kelly’s first grandchild, Riley Gardner, is the bank’s next heir apparent, who has worked for the bank since 2019 and currently serves as a business development officer.

Today’s River City Bank

Becoming a Boutique Commercial Bank

As Shawn Devlin describes her father, Jon was a mass marketer and man of action focused on consumers. Devlin and Fleming, both self-described as more conservative, decided to turn their attention to building long-term relationships with businesses and focus on creating what they called a boutique commercial bank.

Today, River City Bank operates its headquarters and 8 branches in Sacramento, and has a presence in San Francisco with two offices. In 2021, it expanded lending operations into other western markets, advertising for CRE opportunities in Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

The bank has an impressive 7% market share of the Sacramento market, behind Wells Fargo at 8.8% and U.S. Bank at 62%.