Fifth Third paid $10.9 billion for Comerica, or $82.88 a share in stock, when the banks signed the deal in October 2025, a 20% premium to Comerica’s 10-day volume-weighted average price. The all-stock combination closed in February, creating the ninth-largest U.S. bank by assets. It’s the biggest regional bank tie-up since BB&T’s 2019 purchase of SunTrust built Truist.
Nine months in, Fifth Third is showing the buyer’s math working. The second-quarter earnings release posted $763 million in net income available to common shareholders, tangible book value per share up 10% year over year, adjusted return on tangible common equity of 19% and an adjusted efficiency ratio of 57%. CEO Tim Spence says the systems conversion set for Labor Day weekend is the last step before the bank hits the full $850 million in annualized run-rate synergies it promised when the deal signed.
What Fifth Third actually bought is Comerica’s middle-market franchise and its Texas, California and Arizona footprint, the scale that gets a regional bank into the top nine. The U.S. Treasury had already stripped Comerica of its role running Direct Express, the prepaid card program for 3.4 million federal benefit recipients, and handed the contract to Fifth Third a month before the merger was announced. Buying the target after already taking its biggest government contract isn’t the usual order of operations.
Systems conversion lands over Labor Day. That’s when the synergy math gets tested for real.
— Diana Kowalski