BIRMINGHAM, Ala.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Integrated Legacy Solutions (ILS), the leading provider of data and image migrations to the financial industry, released its quarterly review of industry merger and acquisition data for the first quarter of 2019. Derived from data provided by the Federal Reserve System, the research quantifies all U.S. bank M&A activity closing in the first quarter of 2019.
2019 banking M&A activity started off the year with a strong, active first quarter. The first quarter saw 65 M&A deals close which is a 21% increase from what was announced for the first quarter. 2019’s opening quarter matched 2018’s Q1 exactly (in 65 closed deals) and continued a 7 plus year trend of over 60 deals being closed in the first quarter. The first quarter also saw a slight, 3 deal, increase over 2018’s Q4 which has not happened since 2015. Q1 of 2019’s activity spiked geographically in the middle of the country with 36 of the 65 deals, or 55%, coming from the central region. The largest deal closed of the first quarter was Synovus Financial’s $2.9 billion-dollar acquisition of FCB Financial Holdings. With the merger of FCB, Synovus has now become a top five regional bank by deposits in the Southeast, with approximately $45 billion in assets, $37 billion in deposits, $35 billion in loans.
“Nationwide, the trend continues to move upward in both the number of deals announced and the size of the deals. It’s interesting to correlate the banking M&A trends with the nation’s economic and growth trends for population and small business,” said Kris Bishop, President and CEO of Integrated Legacy Solutions.
The overall M&A activities in the United States experienced an increase to $658.76B USD in Q1 from $472.5B in Q4, reflecting a 39.4% increase. The financial sector made up the second largest portion of the overall United States deal volume in Q1 representing $112.7 billion or 17.1% of all deals. This is largely due to continuing regulatory relief and a surging economy in most areas. Banking M&A seems to be driven by current economic data, optimism in future growth and with 45 deals having been already announced for Q2 it seems that the trend will continue. The second quarter is historically a slightly more active quarter than the first with 2015 being the last time that Q2 saw a dip in activity. Currently the southeast, or Atlanta Region, is leading the way with 12 total announced deals representing 26% of Q2’s announced deals. Q2 is also projected to be another strong quarter for the central United States with 51% of the already announced deals coming from the central regions.
“We expected to see the deal size increase and continue to move up the scale to the larger mid-tier or super regional banks,” Bishop stated in the ILS 2018 M&A Annual Review (Released February 12, 2019 – click HERE for article). “This quarter we saw the proof, as highest priced asset class are banks greater than $10B with a price to tangible book of 172%. We believe this trend will continue as evidenced by the size of the 45 whole bank transactions announced in the first quarter including one of the largest bank mergers in the past decade.”
Other notable insights from the first quarter of 2019 include:
- The Kansas City region had the most deals closed in Q1 with 14 deals closed. Which is also a 27% increase from Q1 of 2018
- The New England region had the fewest amount of deals closed in Q1 with only 1 deal closed. This marks the 4th straight year that the New England region has had only 1 deal closed in Q1
- The Mid-South region saw the most significant change from Q1 of 2018 to Q1 of 2019 with a 65% decrease in closed deals
- The Chicago region was up 71% from Q1 of 2018 with 12 deals closed
- Q1 has seen 65 or more deals closed for over seven years in a row
- Over the past 5 years Q1 has averaged over 70 deals
- Over half of Q1’s closed deals came from the central United States
About Integrated Legacy Solutions
Headquartered in
Birmingham, Ala., Integrated Legacy Solutions (ILS) provides industry
leading technology for image and data migrations to the financial
industry. ILS’s leadership team has performed data conversion for
thousands of financial institutions over their 20 plus years in the
financial industry. ILS has designed innovative ways to migrate data
with greater efficiency than other costly and time-consuming methods of
data conversion.
To download the entire ILS 2019 Q1 M&A report with charts and tables, click: HERE