Fifth Third Bancorp said on September 8 that it had finished moving close to 600,000 former Comerica customers and 293 branches across Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Texas onto its own systems, a conversion carried out over Labor Day weekend. The move caps the integration that began when the two banks joined forces on February 1, and turns Fifth Third into the ninth-biggest bank in the country by size, with north of $300 billion on the balance sheet. The combined bank now runs roughly 1,500 branches and 21,300 ATMs, and in Texas it operates 107 financial centers with plans to spend nearly $1 billion over five years to add 150 new centers by 2029; by 2030 it expects roughly 1,750 branches total, with more than half in Texas, the Southeast, Arizona and California. Early numbers show $2.5 billion of consumer deposits pulled in from the Comerica Southwest marketing push, Newline deposits up $2.1 billion with fee revenue there up 35% year over year, net interest margin widening 6 basis points sequentially to 3.36%, and an adjusted efficiency ratio improving 480 basis points from the prior quarter to 57.1%. The integration has not come free: merger-related charges cut $155 million from after-tax income in the second quarter, part of a $0.19 per share drag from certain items, with year-to-date merger costs already about 65% of the full-year expectation, while the CET1 capital ratio sat at 9.93% versus 10.58% a year earlier and the NPL ratio rose to 0.58% from 0.54%.
Fifth Third BancorpFifth Third completed the Comerica systems conversion, lifting it to the ninth-biggest US bank with over $300B in assets and improved efficiency ratio and net interest margin.
