Capital intensive

Consider 1997 the year Florida's banking industry witnessed the equivalent of a gust of wind on a dandelion. That's the year NationsBank announced it would buy Barnett Banks, Florida's largest homegrown banking institution for $15.5 billion.

Gary Tice, a 40-year veteran of Florida's banking industry and chairman and CEO of First Florida Integrity Bank in Naples, says many Barnett bankers subsequently left NationsBank to form community banks throughout the state. That dandelion-like effect sparked a community bank boom through the early 2000s. “It was one of the things that kicked it off,” he says.

Indeed, the government's green light for interstate banking and the Barnett deal sparked a frenzy of bank formations and acquisitions that culminated when Fifth Third Bank acquired Tice's Naples-based First National Bankshares of Florida for $1.6 billion in early 2005, a record 6.5 times tangible book value. At the time of the sale, First National had grown to become the largest bank-holding company in Florida with $5.3 billion in assets, $3.9 billion in deposits and 77 branches stretching from the Tampa Bay area and Orlando to Sarasota, Fort Myers and Naples.