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First switches to Fifth Third

The Midwest banking powerhouse spent a busy weekend converting locations.

By JEFF HARRINGTON
Published February 15, 2005

Tampa Bay area bank customers played a numbers game Monday morning as 27 bay area First National Bank branches opened as newly converted Fifth Third Bank locations.

And an even bigger numbers change is brewing, says Brian Keenan, president of Fifth Third's Tampa Bay region.

"Our mission is to triple our size in the next three years through new bank sites and acquisitions," Keenan said during a grand opening reception at a Fifth Third branch in Tampa's West Shore district.

"There are a lot of places we're not in and we need to be."

Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bancorp struck a deal last August to buy Naples-based First National Bankshares of Florida for $1.6-billion in stock. The merger eliminated the largest remaining bank with headquarters on Florida's west coast.

Midwestern powerhouse Fifth Third has long had a small presence in Florida, but never the breadth to handle the flow of its customers southward on Interstate 75 until now.

An internal survey indicated about 50,000 Fifth Third customers who had Florida addresses, as a second home or primary residence, were not part of the bank's small presence in Naples, Keenan said.

With First National, Fifth Third has 87 locations statewide with 1,500 employees and more than $5-billion in deposits. Ten branches are under construction.

In the bay area, the bank has $1-billion in deposits in its 15 branches in Pinellas County and 12 branches in Hillsborough County. Keenan oversees 270 employees in the bay area and intends to hire 40 more.

No new branches are under way in the region, but Keenan cited ample opportunity to expand into Pasco, Polk and Hernando counties.

All the signage and computers for the bay area First National branches and most of its branches statewide were switched to Fifth Third's network over the weekend. Monday morning, customers got their first taste of the latest entrant in the area's hypercompetitive banking market, with branches passing out pastries and fruit in addition to brochures on home equity lines.

First National's tenure as the Florida Gulf Coast's biggest bank was a brief one. The Naples institution was created in January 2004 as a spinoff of the Florida operations of F.N.B. Corp., a Pennsylvania bank.

--Jeff Harrington can be reached at harrington@sptimes.com or 813226-3407.

[Last modified February 15, 2005, 01:15:09]