Atlanta’s SunTrust to merge with BB&T, shift HQ to Charlotte (Sandy Springs: best cities, city hall)

[aries4118]

Face it, y'all:


Atlanta is nothing. Charlotte is everything.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpr2x26FDAg

[chiatldal]

Originally Posted by citidata18

That's just blatantly false.

Dallas is home to Comerica Bank, as well as the financial divisions for GE and GM. It's also home to several notable lending institutions (Hilltop Holdings, CashAmerica, Caliber Home Loans, etc.).

Even Houston is home to Prosperity Bancshares and Amergy Bank.

Atlanta's practically in a league of its own (not a good one) at this point without a major bank HQ and little in the way of a banking/finance industry (unless you count the Federal Reserve), other than maybe Seattle.

Increably misleading post, having a bank HQ does not make a city a financial hub

Dallas and Houston are not financial hubs, Dallas largest is Comerica is 41st largest bank $71B, Houston Prosperity Bancshares is $22.


SunTrust Banks is 17 with $211B

BB&T is 16 with $222B


To put in more prospective Charlotte Bank of America 2nd is $2,338B


Cities like NeW York, Charlotte, SF have mutiple Banks with over 100B in assets and even 1,000B. then was cities like Boston, Minneapolis Atlanta "before merger" had banks with 100B in assets. Calling Dallas 71B a finance hub is misleading to how significant the actual hubs are.

What this merger does speak volumes how fragile the is., If Atlanta a city that have the 17 largest bank, with more assets than double Houston and Dallas combine is merging with another bank. What does that say about how fragile the prospects are for Dallas and Houston. At any monument is a larger Bank deem it worth it they try buying out another.

I think in general the country is going down the wrong path with allowing all these mergers.

[citidata18]

For the record, you don't have to be home to $100 billion or even $1 trillion dollar financial institutions to be a "hub."

That's like saying Atlanta isn't a film hub because it's not home to the largest film conglomerates.

Originally Posted by chiatldal

I think in general the country is going down the wrong path with allowing all these mergers.

That we both agree on.

[J2rescue]

Originally Posted by chiatldal

Increably misleading post, having a bank HQ does not make a city a financial hub

Dallas and Houston are not financial hubs, Dallas largest is Comerica is 41st largest bank $71B, Houston Prosperity Bancshares is $22.


SunTrust Banks is 17 with $211B

BB&T is 16 with $222B


To put in more prospective Charlotte Bank of America 2nd is $2,338B


Cities like NeW York, Charlotte, SF have mutiple Banks with over 100B in assets and even 1,000B. then was cities like Boston, Minneapolis Atlanta "before merger" had banks with 100B in assets. Calling Dallas 71B a finance hub is misleading to how significant the actual hubs are.

What this merger does speak volumes how fragile the is., If Atlanta a city that have the 17 largest bank, with more assets than double Houston and Dallas combine is merging with another bank. What does that say about how fragile the prospects are for Dallas and Houston. At any monument is a larger Bank deem it worth it they try buying out another.

I think in general the country is going down the wrong path with allowing all these mergers.

Great points.

[Pemgin]

What's the likelihood that another bank would come to Atlanta? What would it take to get them here?

[citidata18]

Originally Posted by Pemgin

What's the likelihood that another bank would come to Atlanta? What would it take to get them here?

The most likely possibility would be Synovus relocating here from Columbus. The current CEO was the CEO of Bank of North Georgia before Synovus acquired it.

Similar thing is happening in Detroit. Chemical Bank in Midland, MI has merged with TCF Bank in Minneapolis and is moving their HQ to downtown Detroit.

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by Pemgin

What's the likelihood that another bank would come to Atlanta? What would it take to get them here?

Originally Posted by citidata18

The most likely possibility would be Synovus relocating here from Columbus. The current CEO was the CEO of Bank of North Georgia before Synovus acquired it.

Similar thing is happening in Detroit. Chemical Bank in Midland, MI has merged with TCF Bank in Minneapolis and is moving their HQ to downtown Detroit.

Stealing a bank headquarters from Columbus (GA) so that Charlotte can eventually steal that bank headquarters from Atlanta?

… I like it! (sarcasm)

Seriously... To answer the question of "What's the likelihood that another bank would come to Atlanta?," I guess that one would have to respond with the question of "What's the likelihood that Charlotte would eventually raid Atlanta for whatever other major bank that we could get to move their headquarters here?"

As others have noted, SunTrust was basically Atlanta's last remaining major bank headquarters that Charlotte had not yet taken... And now Charlotte has taken that, too.

At this point in time, Charlotte has pretty much taken Atlanta's entire banking industry.

There literally is nothing. left. to. give.

Though, I guess if it is any consolation, Atlanta is not the only city that has been raided by Charlotte's corporate banking conquests.

Charlotte's banking scene has most notably raided major bank headquarters in other large cities like Newark (New Jersey), Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem.

… Which, Winston-Salem is a city that has now lost two major bank headquarters to Charlotte (BB&T in 2019, and back in 2001 when First Union of Charlotte acquired Wachovia of Winston-Salem and kept the Wachovia name seven years before a collapsing Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo during the 2008 Financial Crisis).

Atlanta and Georgia seems to have been raided by Charlotte for its major bank headquarters more than any other locale.

With the acquisition of Atlanta-based SunTrust by Winston-Salem based BB&T and the establishment of the consolidated bank's headquarters in Charlotte, Atlanta and Georgia have now been raided for its banks at least five times by Charlotte's dominant banking scene.

I guess that Charlotte seems to deserve every bit of their reputation for being some cold-blooded (yet ambitious) hustlers and corporate raiders... And in the way that it seems to count the most, with money and financial assets.

[Born 2 Roll]

Jim Cramer of CNBC "Mad Money" fame (or infamy, depending on one's viewpoint) says the BB&T-SunTrust merger has more to do with technology than any metric of traditional success for big banks.

Cramer says that the the BB&T-SunTrust merger is basically about keeping up with what other major banks like Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, etc., are already doing to attract new customers and serve their existing customer bases with the latest digital technology.

"I think this SunTrust-BB&T deal may be more about playing digital defense than offense," he said. "It's about giving the combined company the scale to invest more heavily in technology, and less in brick-and-mortar, in order to keep those clients happy in a digital world and get some new clients — keep them from migrating to Bank of America."

Cramer: What Wall Street doesn't get about the SunTrust-BB&T merger (Yahoo Finance)

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by citidata18

That's a ridiculous take (I call it mental gymnastics).

Regardless of how you spin this, it's a significant blow that a company like NS won't mend.

I agree with that and so were some others who mentioned NS. Atlanta will feel a negative impact from SunTrust's departure and most likely NS won't make up for that when it comes to the quantity of jobs, average salaries, overall economic impact, etc.
Once again, we agree on that point.

However, that is an entirely different matter from Atlanta's overall attractiveness as major hub for corporate headquarters. They are two separate issues and it's easy to see why the HQ for the merged bank will just be some miles down the road in the same state, which so happens to be a top national banking hub. Atlanta has landed several high-profile corporate relocations within the past three years or so, including NS, which testifies to the strength of Atlanta's overall corporate climate. But if you want to argue that the loss of a major corporate headquarters through aquisition means that Atlanta's corporate climate is lackluster compared to Charlotte's, then you'd have to explain how the loss of the headquarters of Family Dollar, Belk, Harris Teeter, Wachovia, and about six other banks over the past couple of years--all via acquisitions--give Charlotte a huge leg up on Atlanta in that regard. The Charlotte Observer even ran this article last year bemoaning the loss of a slew of banking headquarters the city had lost in preceding years: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/ne...214190159.html

The fact of the matter is cities gain and lose corporate headquarters all the time with mergers and acquisitions being primary reasons. Obviously the region that is on the losing end will feel negative impacts of that loss, not to mention a bruising of their civic pride. But to isolate one loss, as major or minor as it may be, and then conclude that the economic sky is falling is preposterous. Now if the passage of time reveals that it was the first of many to follow, then it would be obvious that something is indeed wrong and sometimes that is known ahead of time due to major shakeups and interruptions in certain industries already occurring. Now if Charlotte has been able to strongly bounce back from its setbacks caused by a global recession, then it's pretty reasonable to conclude that Atlanta will do the same, and in the absence of such a major global economic catastrophe as the cause at that.

And for the final time, I want to stress that I agree that NS nor any other single corporate headquarters relocation that Atlanta has snagged recently can economically offset the loss of SunTrust jobs. But that's a very separate issue from Atlanta's overall attractiveness as a hub for corporate headquarters. I honestly don't know how to break it down any further for you and if you still think this is but another exercise in mental gymnastics, then I just don't have anything else for you.

[Mutiny77]

Originally Posted by citidata18

For the record, you don't have to be home to $100 billion or even $1 trillion dollar financial institutions to be a "hub."

Surely there's no specific dollar amount tied to hub status, but if you lower the bar to where most places can be considered a hub, then in reality nowhere is a hub. When the nation's most generally-recognized banking hubs are talked about, Atlanta isn't really talked about and that's while it still has SunTrust and the same is true for Dallas and Houston. As major cities they will naturally have large banking sectors as will Atlanta even after the acquisition is complete as there will still be many jobs with the newly-merged bank in the city along with existing operations. But hub status conveys something beyond that and in the banking industry, cities with a certain mass of the nation's biggest banks and the infrastructure and affiliated industries that come with that are more commonly known as hubs. But if you wish to die on this hill undergirded by semantic technicality, knock yourself out.