Do You Really Need a Bank Holding Company?

The boards of directors at three, multibillion-dollar, publicly traded banks recently chose to get rid of their holding companies. Bank of the Ozarks, BancorpSouth and Zions Bank, N.A. are now or soon will be stand-alone, publicly traded banks. For years, Republic Bank and Signature Bank have also operated as publicly traded banks without a holding company.

According to the public filings of Ozarks and BancorpSouth, the boards of those two organizations decided that having a holding company on top of their bank was way more trouble than it was worth in terms of dollars and time. The Zions board concluded that subject to regulatory approval, the bank would no longer be “systemically important” if it did not have a financial holding company structure. In the process, all three banks eliminated at least two regulators—the Federal Reserve, which oversees bank holding companies, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). None of the former holding companies were engaged in any significant nonbanking activities that couldn’t be conducted by the bank, either directly or through a subsidiary. For banks, the federal securities laws are administered by the bank’s primary federal banking regulator, rather than the SEC.

Life is a series of trade-offs, and none us can predict the future, but the increase in efficiencies for these organizations seems to have been worth giving up the flexibility afforded by operating in a bank holding company structure. For most banks that aren’t actively using their holding companies to engage in those non-bank activities that may only be performed under a holding company structure, the cost of eliminating the holding company is quickly recovered. If it turns out that eliminating the holding company was a bad idea, the Federal Reserve seems receptive to accepting and approving applications to form bank holding companies from many organizations, including those that had previously eliminated them.

Ozarks and BancorpSouth, like Signature and Republic before them, file their periodic reports under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Zions, which operates under a national charter, will make those filings with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The shares of the banks are still listed on Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

Shareholders and analysts don’t seem to care that the banks’ filings are no longer available on EDGAR, an electronic filing system maintained by the SEC that investors can access. One can argue that bank holding companies that have over $1 billion in consolidated assets and thus are not eligible for the Fed’s Small One Bank Holding Company Policy Statement should consider whether their enterprise is getting its money’s worth from having a holding company—some are, and some aren’t. But remaining in a holding company structure simply because that is the way you’ve always done it is not sufficient analysis to withstand even polite questions from your shareholders.

The process of becoming a stand-alone bank is not intimidating for folks who know their way around the corporate and regulatory world in which banking organizations operate, but there are a number of important questions that bank boards need to consider, including: “Can we execute our business plan without a holding company?” Also, “Are the corporate laws applicable to banks chartered in our state as flexible as the laws applicable to our holding company?”

Three prominent banking organizations making a move like this in a six-month span might not signal a new trend, but it should cause directors at other banks to ask whether they really need a bank holding company.