Where Hancock Whitney and Trustmark Overlap: 14 Counties, First Place in Mississippi and One Alabama County Over the Antitrust Screen

The fifth slide of the deck Hancock Whitney filed on the morning of 12 November makes the headline claim for its new deal: the No. 1 deposit position in Mississippi and No. 2 in Louisiana. The first is new. The second is where Hancock Whitney already stands, because Trustmark does not have a single branch in Louisiana.

Hancock Whitney, the Gulfport, Mississippi bank, agreed to buy Trustmark of Jackson, Mississippi in an all-stock deal valued at about $3.2 billion, the companies said on 12 November 2026. Trustmark holders will get 0.7463 Hancock Whitney shares each. The combined bank would hold about $58 billion in assets, and the deal needs shareholder and regulatory approval.

What is Hancock Whitney paying?

About $54.02 a Trustmark share, according to the investor presentation, a value that will move with Hancock Whitney's stock because the exchange ratio is fixed. Working backwards from the ratio, that implies a Hancock Whitney share price of about $72.38; the release says the value is based on its close on 11 November. The division is ours. Hancock Whitney's shareholders would own about 65 per cent of the combined company and Trustmark's about 35 per cent.

The deck puts the price at 1.78 times Trustmark's tangible book value and 11.8 times its estimated 2028 earnings, or 7.2 times once the promised savings are counted. Those savings are the heart of the case: $205.5 million a year before tax, equal to 35 per cent of Trustmark's non-interest expense, with 37.5 per cent of it realised in 2027. The companies expect $250 million of merger costs. They say the deal adds about 7 per cent to Hancock Whitney's 2028 earnings per share and dilutes its tangible book value per share by about 7 per cent, which it would earn back in about 2.8 years.

The combined company keeps the Hancock Whitney name, its Gulfport headquarters and its chief executive, John M. Hairston. Five Trustmark directors, including chief executive Duane Dewey, join the board, and a Central Mississippi Advisory Board will sit in Jackson. "We are pleased to welcome Trustmark to the Hancock Whitney organization," Mr Hairston said in the release. The deal is expected to close late in the first quarter of 2027, with systems converted late that year.

Where do the two banks compete?

Less often than the size of the deal suggests. The FDIC's Summary of Deposits records how much every bank holds at every branch as of 30 June each year. We pulled every 2026 branch record in the seven states either bank touches and summed them by county, metropolitan area and state.

Hancock Whitney Bank reported $29.9 billion of deposits across 186 offices, according to FDIC records, and 57 per cent of that money sits in Louisiana, the legacy of Whitney, the New Orleans bank it agreed to buy in 2010. Trustmark reported $16.2 billion across 176 branches, and two-thirds of its money is in Mississippi. Of the 105 counties where either bank has a branch, both are present in only 14.

The two home markets barely touch. In Gulfport-Biloxi, Hancock Whitney already holds 41.6 per cent of deposits through 19 offices, and Trustmark has two branches. In Jackson, Trustmark holds 29.6 per cent through 33 branches, and Hancock Whitney has one. Combining them adds little concentration in either place, because one side of each pair is so small.

Would regulators object?

On our numbers, almost certainly not on competition grounds, with one small exception. The first screen in the bank regulators' 1995 merger guidelines flags a deal when it pushes a market's concentration index above 1,800 and raises it by more than 200 points. The FDIC proposed in September to write those same 1,800/200 thresholds into a formal safe harbour, according to a summary by the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell; comments are due on 23 November.

Panama City and Hattiesburg see the largest increases, but both stay well under 1,800 afterwards. Gulfport-Biloxi starts above 1,800 but rises by only 56 points. Only Butler County, Alabama, a rural county of about $430 million of deposits centred on Greenville, fails both tests. There the two banks run four of the county's nine branches: Trustmark has two in Greenville and one in Georgiana, Hancock Whitney one in Greenville. Together they would hold 59 per cent of local deposits, and the index would rise by about 1,700 points.

A caveat on our method. Regulators measure concentration in banking markets the Federal Reserve draws, which do not always match counties or metropolitan areas, and the screen gives savings institutions' deposits half weight. Our figures are an approximation of the screen, not a replication. The companies have not said whether they expect to sell any branches.

How big does this make the bank in Mississippi?

Big enough to lead the state, by a margin. Mississippi banks held $83.1 billion of deposits in June. Trustmark was already first with 12.9 per cent, just ahead of Huntington Bancshares on 12.2 per cent, Renasant on 11.0 and Regions on 10.2. Hancock Whitney was sixth with 5.4 per cent. Together they would have 18.3 per cent, about six points clear of the next bank.

Louisiana is a different story. Hancock Whitney holds $17.0 billion there, 12.4 per cent of the state's deposits, second to JPMorgan Chase's 16.9 per cent. Trustmark adds nothing, so the "No. 2 in Louisiana" on the deck is the rank Hancock Whitney already holds.

One more gap between the deck and the filings: the presentation counts 370 branches for the combined bank, while the FDIC's June data list 186 Hancock Whitney offices and 176 Trustmark offices, or 362. The deck does not explain the difference, and it does not say how many branches will close.

Fifteen years after the last one

The template is familiar to Hancock Whitney. In December 2010, Hancock Holding of Gulfport agreed to buy Whitney Holding of New Orleans for stock, at 0.418 Hancock shares per Whitney share, or $15.48, according to its release then. The combined bank had about $20 billion of assets and 305 branches. This deal would leave it with nearly three times those assets and 65 more branches than that first combination, and would take it into Tennessee, where Trustmark has 15 branches and Hancock Whitney has none.

Regional bank deals of this kind live or die on whether the savings arrive. Fifth Third's first quarter with Comerica fully absorbed showed how long that can take to show up in an efficiency ratio. Hancock Whitney is promising a ratio below 50 per cent by 2028, against 64 per cent at Trustmark on its own in the profile the deck gives as of 30 September. Holding on to Trustmark's depositors through a rebrand matters as much, a problem regional banks have been spending on for some time. "We and Hancock Whitney have long held a shared commitment to exceptional client service and relationship banking," Mr Dewey said.

The next documents to watch are the joint proxy statement and the applications to bank regulators. Those will show whether the companies plan to sell branches in Butler County, how they define the Mississippi markets, and when shareholders of both banks vote.

The deal terms, the quotes from John M. Hairston and Duane Dewey, the advisers and the timetable are from the companies' joint press release of 12 November 2026, filed as Exhibit 99.1 to Hancock Whitney's Form 8-K. The price-to-tangible-book and earnings multiples, cost savings, merger costs, pro forma figures, deposit rankings and Trustmark's 30 September 2026 profile are from the investor presentation filed as Exhibit 99.2. Branch-level deposits as of 30 June 2026 for every bank in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia are from the FDIC's Summary of Deposits, and the banks' office counts from the FDIC's institution records, both retrieved on 12 November 2026. The 2010 Hancock-Whitney terms are from Hancock Holding's press release of 22 December 2010. The description of the 1,800/200 screen and the FDIC's September 2026 proposal is from a Sullivan & Cromwell summary published on 9 October 2026. The implied Hancock Whitney share price, every market share, every Herfindahl-Hirschman Index figure and the county counts are this publication's arithmetic. They use metropolitan areas and counties rather than the Federal Reserve's defined banking markets and weight all deposits fully, so they approximate, and do not replicate, a regulator's screen. The analysis is our own.

Topics businessbankingFDICdepositsantitrust