TCF, Minnesota's third-largest bank, will merge with Huntington and give up its name

TCF Financial, Minnesota's third-largest bank, is being swept up in another merger — and this time will lose its name.

The bank, which moved its headquarters to Detroit from Wayzata when it merged with Chemical Financial last year, said it will join forces with Ohio-based Huntington Bancshares to become one of the nation's top 20 banks with $168 billion in assets.

The combined company will use the Huntington name. That will lead to the renaming of TCF branches as well as venues where TCF bought naming rights, including the football stadium at the University of Minnesota and the convention center in downtown Detroit, which was in the news last month as the site of ballot counting for that city.

TCF is about 15 years into a 26-year, $35 million sponsorship agreement with the U.

"It will become Huntington over time," Steve Steinour, Huntington's CEO, said of the stadium in an interview Monday with the Star Tribune. "We'll run with a single brand. But we want to be sensitive to the history and the legacy of TCF, and the stadium, so there's work we'll have to do with the university and other interested parties."

TCF bank branches and ATMs are expected to be rebranded with the Huntington name next year. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.

Once the deal is approved, Columbus-based Huntington will consolidate branches in some markets where there is quite a bit of overlap with TCF banks. In Detroit, for example, there is sometimes a Huntington bank across the street from a TCF. Branch consolidation as well as overhead and functional efficiencies are some of the areas where Huntington expects to find $490 million in cost savings through the deal.

But Steinour noted that the Twin Cities will be a new market for Huntington, and so he doesn't expect to have to close branches here because of the merger. Instead, he said he is "thrilled" to expand Huntington's presence in Minnesota, particularly through its small business lending and home mortgage services.

"We'll be investing," he said. "We want to grow in Minneapolis."

He said executives will assess the company's operations in Minnesota, but didn't announce any immediate changes. The company employs about 2,400 people in the state, many of them an office complex in Plymouth.

Steinour said he was especially impressed with TCF's technology teams in the Twin Cities, which he hoped to make into a tech hub for Huntington.

"We greatly respect what TCF has accomplished over many years there," he said. "There's an incredibly talented team. We're eager to invite them over to Huntington. I hope many of them will join us. We think of this as a big opportunity."

The all-stock deal, valued at $22 billion, is one of the largest in the banking industry this year, when the pandemic created the first recession since 2008 and forced bankers to concentrate on helping customers while protecting their balance sheets.

In the last several years, the industry has seen a wave of mergers as bankers cope with the disruption to their business model caused by the rise of digital banking and new competitors that don't have physical branches.

In January last year, TCF and Chemical Financial announced they would merge, becoming a firm with $45 billion in assets and nearly 500 branches in nine states. TCF's then-chief executive Craig Dahl became CEO of the combined firm.

Seven weeks ago, he announced his immediate retirement, surprising investors. "There isn't really any time that would necessarily be better than others," he said on Oct. 27.

Steinour said the idea for the Huntington-TCF merger started with an offhand comment over the summer that turned into more serious talks in late October.

"As we were thinking from our third-quarter earnings of our optimism about the economy and recovery, that led me to pick up the phone and call Gary," he said, referring to Gary Torgow, TCF's executive chairman.

Steinour added there was no connection between the deal and Dahl's retirement. "I would have called Gary irregardless at that same moment," he said, adding that he's known Torgow for years.

TCF, rooted in a Minneapolis thrift called Twin City Federal Savings and Loan, is No. 3 behind Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank in the number of branches and assets in Minnesota.

Huntington has $120 billion in assets and 839 branches in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia and Kentucky.

The combined company will have dual headquarters in Columbus and Detroit.

Huntington said it will maintain TCF's recently-announced $1 billion commitment over five years to support minority-owned and women-owned small businesses. Huntington had announced a $5-billion plan to help small businesses, minority-owned businesses and others in Michigan.