We argue that more stringent state-level branching regulations during a bank’s founding period keep financial resources local and imprint it with a routine that focuses on local expansion. However, such processes may be reshaped by violent crimes—an important extra-institutional force—that shift resources away from small local banks toward larger ones and make the former more vulnerable. So, when the crime rate is high, stringent branching regulations make small local banks less likely to find potential buyers and more likely to fail, suggesting to newly founded banks the importance of exploring resources beyond the founding location. The two forces combined tend to imprint new banks with a routine for nonlocal expansion. Taken together, such an imprinting process leads to banks that are either jacks of all locations (i.e., expanding beyond the headquarter city) or masters of one (i.e., expanding within the headquarter city). Using a longitudinal bank-level sample that covers 9,686 U.S. banks founded between 1966 and 2021 in 3,342 zip-code-defined locations, we find supportive evidence for our hypotheses. Our research contributes to imprinting theory by unpacking the resource allocation mechanism behind the institutional production of imprints and unveiling that some imprints may reflect the opposite of institutional requirements. Relatedly, we contribute to institutional theory by showing how imprinting theory helps better understand what are commonly thought of as unintended consequences of institutions.