BB&T → SunTrust
BB&T of Winston-Salem and SunTrust of Atlanta combined in an all-share merger of equals in 2019, creating Truist with about $442bn of assets; the deal shared out the headquarters, the board and the succession, and was followed by a goodwill write-off, the sale of the insurance arm and an outside chief executive.
The largest US bank merger since the financial crisis, creating Truist Financial as the sixth-largest bank by assets.
- Value
- $28.2B
- Announced
- February 2019
- Completed
- December 2019
- Sector
- Banking
- Deal type
- merger
- Acquirer
- BB&T (United States)
- Target
- SunTrust (United States)
Why it mattered
Both banked mainly across the South-east and Mid-Atlantic: BB&T had $225.7bn of assets and SunTrust $216bn at the end of 2018. Announced on 7 February 2019, the merger gave SunTrust shareholders 1.295 BB&T shares for each of theirs, leaving BB&T's owners with about 57% of a company the banks valued at about $66bn. The pitch was scale — at least $1.6bn of net cost savings by 2022 and more money for technology in a digital-first industry.
Everything else was split evenly. The board and executive team were divided between the two banks; BB&T's Kelly King would be chairman and chief executive until September 2021, with SunTrust's Bill Rogers as president and then his successor. Neither home city got the head office: the new company moved to Charlotte, keeping community banking in Winston-Salem and wholesale banking in Atlanta, which lost its last big bank headquarters. The name Truist, chosen with the brand consultancy Interbrand and announced in June 2019, drew criticism from analysts and customers. The Federal Reserve approved the merger on 19 November 2019 on condition that 30 branches and more than $2.4bn of deposits were sold, and it closed on 6 December.
What it left behind
Integration was slowed by the pandemic, which pushed the combination of the two banks' systems into 2022. Rogers took over as planned, but in the fourth quarter of 2023 Truist wrote off $6.1bn of goodwill. It then sold what remained of its insurance brokerage, Truist Insurance Holdings, to a group led by Stone Point Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice at a $15.5bn valuation, completing in May 2024 with $10.1bn of cash, after which it sold $27.7bn of low-yielding securities at a $5.1bn after-tax loss. On 1 September 2026 an outsider, Michael Lyons, formerly chief executive of Fiserv, became chief executive, with Rogers staying as executive chair until April 2027. A merger of equals makes the social questions easy to agree at signing; the financial ones — which systems, which costs, which businesses to keep — arrive later and are harder.