The US Federal Reserve on November 25, 2025, said that it has given its approval for the Nashville, Tennessee-based Pinnacle Bank to merge with Synovus Bank from Georgia’s Columbus.
Since the shareholders of each company went on to approve the combination on November 6, 2025, the merger is anticipated to be completed by January 1, the banks said in a November 6 news release.
It is worth noting that the merger is going to create a $116 billion-asset bank, which will adopt the Pinnacle name, with the holding company based out of Atlanta and the bank headquartered in Nashville.
Apparently, the all-stock, $8.6 billion regional bank deal was announced in July 2025 to a tepid investor response. Since then, the CEO of Pinnacle, Terry Turner, who would become the board chair of the combined bank, and Kevin Blair, the CEO of Synovus, who would be the president and CEO, have repeatedly gone on to stress that this combination is going to be different from the last Southeastern merger of equals.
The merger of the $61 billion asset of Synovus and the $54.8 billion asset of Pinnacle is not Truist 2.0, said Turner at one of the investor conferences in September 2025. This is a starkly varied transaction, he added.
Being decisive and also making important decisions early is indeed a part of that distinction, the executives have stressed. In August 2025, both the banks laid out the company’s combined management team.
Blair said that they did not focus too much on the equal part of the MOE, but rather they chose the best athlete so as to make sure that they have the right people seated in the right seats in order to move forward, and they did that early on.
On November 25, the banks remarked that the integration teams are working closely together so as to move towards closing the clear plans for how the firm is going to operate on Day One, while at the same time, building the blueprint when it comes to integration.
All through 2026, systems and processes, as well as the people, are going to be brought together under one Pinnacle brand. Conversions are forecasted to occur in the first half of 2027, the banks said.
Bankers are going to have a little, if any kind of a role when it comes to the administrative work of the combination, in order to avoid losing the traction on their present responsibilities and also winning business, wrote Anthony Elian, the securities analyst from JPMorgan, in a November 13 note. The integration is going to be taken slow in order to make sure potential misfortunes are kept at bay and the right technology solutions get chosen, wrote Elian.
Blair said that there is no shortage of lessons that are learned to draw from a merger like this, and they have made decisions and taken actions in order to avoid the pitfalls. By way of focusing on the client as well as team member experiences and also keeping local leadership along with continuity throughout their markets, they are building on the legacy of Pinnacle as one of the top-performing banks in America, having engaged and purposeful teams, a very loyal as well as growing client base, and also outsized returns to shareholders.
The Fed order
In the order approving the merger, the US Federal Reserve went on to note that both the banks have overlapping operations across Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia, as well as Tennessee. Moreover, the combined company is going to control 5.4%, 1.4%, 8.3%, and 5.1%, as well as 12.7% of the overall number of deposits pertaining to insured depository institutions across those states.
Apparently, the Fed board went on to receive two adverse comments on the proposed merger. One went on to allege that both Synovus and Pinnacle made many fewer home loans to the African Americans as compared to whites in 2024, and that Pinnacle did deny home loan applications that were made by African Americans at a much higher rate vis-à-vis those made by whites.
Another commenter went on to raise similar concerns and also asked the Fed to require the combined company to go ahead and adopt a community benefits agreement in lieu of the condition of its approval. The commenter went on to note that both Synovus and Pinnacle have made lower volumes in terms of mortgage loans as compared to their peers, thereby possibly suggesting fair lending issues, and have voiced concerns with regard to the lending practices of both banks pertaining to the credit accessibility for microbusinesses.
The latter commenter also went ahead and alleged weaknesses in branch distribution of both the banks in low-to moderate-income or majority-non-white census tracts and also flagged the possibility that the merger could as well result in branch consolidation aggravating that.
In response, both Pinnacle and Synovus said their mortgage along with small-business lending looks consistent with or even goes beyond the lending performance of the peer banks in the same Community Reinvestment Act evaluation areas. Regulators have not identified any sort of discriminatory practices at either of the banks, and both lenders have gone on to execute strategies in order to address potential gaps when it comes to their lending performance, which includes initiatives in order to benefit borrowers across the LMI areas, said the banks.
As per the Fed order, the combined bank is indeed committed with regard to complying with fair lending laws and is going to draw on the best practices of both the institutions in order to elevate the pro forma bank’s capacity to meet the credit requirements of the underserved communities.
In addition to this, the banks also pointed to partnerships along with community organizations and also 26 letters of support coming from clients as well as community partners, many of which go on to back up the efforts of the bank to go ahead and meet the requirements of the underserved communities, said the US Federal Reserve.
As for the branch concerns by the commenter, the combined bank is going to continue to identify areas wherein additional locations would support the community requirements, which includes those of the LMI communities, and also anticipate the branch closures or even the relocations for that matter to be small.
Notably, both the banks have received satisfactory ratings when it comes to their most recent CRA performance assessments, confirmed the Fed.