BB&T Corp agreed to buy SunTrust Banks Inc in the world’s largest bank merger in more than a decade, betting that a combination will allow them to keep up with bigger rivals in the arms race for new technology.
The $28bn deal scraps both companies’ names and headquarters, creating an entirely new bank based in Charlotte, North Carolina, with branches throughout the Southeast.
It will be the sixth-biggest commercial bank in the US by assets, supplanting PNC Financial Services Group Inc.
Industry executives have long predicted a wave of bank mergers that until yesterday had played out only in smaller or midsize deals.
Brian Moynihan, chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp, said last month he could envision the creation of another megabank, given the large number of small players spread through the country.
And Ernst & Young said it expects a flurry of transactions this year, fuelled by easing regulations and the US tax overhaul, which helped lenders build a war chest to spend on acquiring new clients and technology.
The banks said the deal will allow more investment in technology while cutting more than 10% of combined total expenses through eliminating duplicate branches and digital systems. The company will create an “Innovation and Technology Center” in its new headquarters, and the statement on the deal used the words technology, digital and innovation more than a dozen times.
The combination “provides the scale needed to compete and win in the rapidly evolving world of financial services,” BB&T CEO Kelly King, who will keep that title at the new company, said in the banks’ joint statement yesterday.
BB&T, founded in the aftermath of the Civil War, and SunTrust, chartered in Georgia in 1891, had been direct competitors in many cities. They said they’ll now have top-3 market share in eight states. The transaction will deliver at least $1.6bn in annual cost savings by 2022, the companies said.
Shareholders of Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based BB&T will own 57% of the combined company. SunTrust investors will receive 1.295 shares of BB&T for each SunTrust share they own, the companies said in the statement. That equates to BB&T agreeing to pay $28.1bn for SunTrust’s equity as of Wednesday’s closing price, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The combined bank, which will be named at a later date, will have almost 60,000 employees and about $440bn in assets. It will also have a 22% return on tangible equity, the firms said, higher profitability than any of the biggest US lenders.
“Scale is the game here,” Ken Usdin, a bank analyst at Jefferies Financial Group Inc, wrote in a note to clients. “The BB&T/SunTrust merger will open more eyes on the potential for more sizeable bank M&A to occur.” The value of mergers and acquisitions in the US financial-services sector more than doubled to $196.5bn in 2018 from $82.3bn in 2017, according to Ernst & Young. The top tier US lenders will likely sit out this wave of consolidation, blocked from getting bigger by political and regulatory hurdles.
King will serve as CEO of the combined company through September 12, 2021, when SunTrust CEO William H Rogers will take over. King will serve a further six months as executive chairman.
SunTrust shares climbed 11% to $65.10 at 8:30am in early New York trading. BB&T rose 5.1%.
Royal Bank of Canada advised BB&T, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc worked with SunTrust.