Bank-on-bank acquisitions soon extinct?

SunTrust Bank, one of the largest regional lenders on the Gulf Coast, might not get much bigger soon.

That's the analysis from SNL Financial, a Charlottesville, Va.,-based research firm. SNL says banks like Atlanta-based SunTrust, with clients in several states, will have a tough time growing through acquisitions of smaller banks, like those institutions could do five or 10 years ago. That also might hold true for regional competitors with a Gulf Coast presence, such as Synovus Bank and BB&T.

The SNL report is based on SunTrust's recent acquisition of San Diego-based First Again, which provides unsecured loans to super-prime borrowers through proprietary Internet-based technology. Those types of deals, of niche financial firms, will become the norm, while bank-on-bank acquisitions will become the rare exception, according to SNL.

“It's just going to be specialty things like this,” analyst Marty Mosby of Guggenheim Securities tells SNL about the SunTrust-First Again deal. “They are not in a mood to really go out and expand into other banks, so they're looking for a fill-in for products or a fill-in for branches in locations that they would like to make sure they are in.”