Federal antitrust regulators are working to update their methodology for reviewing bank-merger deals to go well beyond factors such as the number of branches per market and where deposits come from, a Justice Department official said Tuesday.
Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, said the federal government still has the same interest in protecting competition as it did after a 1963 precedent-setting case involving Philadelphia National Bank. The current bank-merger guidelines were issued by the Department of Justice and the banking agencies in 1995, but he said that the “time is ripe” for updating federal guidelines.
Kanter said the classic measure of calculating whether one bank has too many branches in a given market to allow a merger without divesting some of those branches no longer reflects the effects of online banking, as well as other changes to the business. One recent case where a bank merger failed to win favorable review from regulators was First Horizon Corp.’s FHN deal to be bought by Toronto-Dominion TD bank, which was scuttled in May more than a year after it was announced.