Columbia Financial is the holding company for Columbia Bank, a federally chartered savings bank headquartered in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Columbia Bank operates 71 full-service branches across 12 New Jersey counties, serving retail customers, businesses, and municipalities in the New York City and Philadelphia metro areas. Columbia Bank's core business is traditional community banking: attracting deposits and deploying them into loans to earn net interest income. The loan book totals roughly $8.2B, with commercial real estate and multifamily loans making up about half the portfolio, followed by one-to-four family residential mortgages at roughly a third, and smaller allocations to commercial business loans, construction loans, and home equity. Columbia Bank has been deliberately shifting its mix toward higher-yielding commercial loans, both by hiring experienced lenders and through four New Jersey community bank acquisitions since 2019. Profitability is driven by deposit costs, loan yields, and credit quality — Columbia Bank underwrites conservatively, generally requiring loan-to-value ratios of 75% or below on commercial loans. In late 2024, Columbia Bank sold $352M of lower-yielding securities at a loss and redeployed the proceeds to improve its net interest margin. Beyond lending, Columbia Bank generates modest fee income through its title insurance and insurance subsidiaries. A pending merger with Northfield Bancorp, announced in January 2026, would expand Columbia Bank's footprint into Staten Island and coincide with a conversion to a fully public stock company.