How Future Consolidation Will Change the Value of a Branch

Two long-term trends that have helped shape the banking industry as we know it today are consolidation and the shift from physical distribution built around branches to digital channels, including mobile. Although we tend to think of consolidation and the shift toward digital as separate but parallel evolutionary forces, they are beginning to interact in ways that could impact the bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market going forward.

The number of bank branches has been steadily declining since 2009, when they peaked at 89,775, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data. There was a glut of de novo branches from 2004 to 2007 when, according to veteran bank analyst Tom Brown, founder and CEO of the New York-based hedge fund Second Curve Capital, the popular deposit gathering strategy of many banks was to flood their markets with lots of new brick and mortar in order to sell free checking programs. “Before long, the landscape was littered with redundant, expensive, new bank branches,” writes Brown in his February 17 weekly newsletter. “All this at a time, remember, when consumer behavior was starting to move away from branch banking and toward online banking.”

The seminal event in 2008 was, of course, the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the advent of the sharpest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Since 2009, the number of U.S. bank branches has declined to 83,768 at the end of the third quarter of 2016, or by 6.7 percent. Brown has argued for years that the industry needs to reduce the size of its brick-and-mortar distribution system at a much faster pace. “[As] I’ve said many times, that’s still way too many branches,” Brown writes in his newsletter. “Consumer behavior toward online, non-branch banking isn’t growing at a slow, linear pace, but rather exponentially. A mere 7 percent reduction this decade after the reckless expansion the prior decade isn’t nearly enough.”

And this is where these separate trend lines of consolidation and distribution could begin to merge. For one thing, the quickening pace of the industry’s shift toward digital distribution—most banks have been seeing declines in branch traffic for several years now, which is the primary reason they’ve been closing branches in the first place—could have an impact on a seller’s valuations. If branches are a fixed asset of declining importance (and therefore declining value), how much will an acquirer be willing to pay for them? In an interview, Brown says this impact has already begun to occur. “In the ‘80s and ‘90s, when you did your due diligence on a target, you wanted to see that their branches were owned,” he says. “Today when you evaluate a target, the last thing you want to see is branches with long-term leases.”

It could also be that consolidation will hasten the reduction of branches because they offer a plum cost-takeout target in an acquisition. If a bank’s branch system is one of the most significant components of its cost structure, and if branches are of declining value as the industry continues its shift toward digital distribution, then one of the best ways that a buyer can reduce costs in the combined bank is by closing branches. Cost-takeout deals aren’t new in banking. They were very popular back in the ‘80s when they were the principal merger model. But branches were a much more valuable asset back then, and therefore did not bear the brunt of post-merger cost cutting. It’s a different game today. “It’s not going to be about PNC Financial moving out to the West Coast and buying Western Alliance,” says Brown. “It’s going to be a $20 billion bank buying a $5 billion bank and closing all sorts of branches.”