Huntington Bank’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Cadence Bank received approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Columbus, Ohio-based lender disclosed Monday.
That marks the last regulatory green light needed for the transaction, which is expected to close Feb. 1, Huntington said.
The timeline meets the bank’s initial projection that the deal would close in 2026’s first quarter, with systems conversion following in the second.
The OCC’s green light came 56 days after Huntington announced its intention to acquire Cadence. That’s fast even for the Trump administration, which has progressively truncated the time regulators spend evaluating potential deals.
By comparison, PNC’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Colorado’s FirstBank gained approval from the Federal Reserve 94 days after the deal was announced in September. The $8.6 billion merger of equals between Tennessee-based Pinnacle and Georgia-based Synovus received the Fed’s blessing after 124 days.
The Huntington approval means just one of the four banking deals valued at $4 billion or more proposed between July and October – Fifth Third’s $10.9 billion acquisition of Comerica – awaits final regulatory approval as 2025 draws to a close.
Huntington’s acquisition of Cadence will create a $276 billion-asset bank and expand the Ohio lender’s footprint to 21 states. It will also give Huntington the fifth-largest deposit market share in Dallas, and rank the bank fifth in the same category in Houston and eighth across Texas.
Cadence, with dual headquarters in Tupelo, Mississippi, and Houston, will be the second Texas-based bank Huntington has acquired in recent months. The bank bought Dallas-based Veritex Community Bank in a $1.9 billion deal announced in July.
The deal wraps a busy year for Cadence, too. Before agreeing to combine with Huntington, Cadence bought Industry Bancshares, the holding company of six Texas community banks, in a deal announced in April.
Buying Cadence will give Huntington an added $53 billion in assets, 390 branches and 1 million customers across Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee.
The relatively quick regulatory turnaround marks a stark departure from the merger approval process in the Biden administration, during which deals such as Columbia Banking System’s $5.2 billion merger with Umpqua Bank, announced in October 2021, took more than 16 months to close. For reference, 2024’s biggest banking deal, Capital One’s $35.3 billion acquisition of Discover – proposed under the Biden administration but closed with Trump-era oversight – spent 14 months with regulators.
