EverBank and WaFd Merge to Form $75 Billion Regional Bank

Florida-based EverBank Financial and Pacific Northwest lender WaFd have agreed to a reverse merger that will create a regional bank with roughly $75 billion in combined assets — landing it among the top 50 U.S. banks by size. The deal is structured as a reverse merger, with the smaller WaFd (market cap ~$2.7 billion, ~$28 billion in assets) remaining the publicly traded entity, renaming itself EverBank Financial and trading under the new ticker 'EVBK.'

EverBank, which carries about $47 billion in assets and a valuation of around $3.9 billion, was acquired in 2023 by a consortium of private-equity heavyweights — Stone Point Capital, Warburg Pincus, Reverence Capital Partners, Sixth Street, and Bayview Asset Management — from pension giant TIAA. Those PE firms had been weighing a sale or IPO as an exit path. Post-merger, that investor group along with TIAA, which retained a stake in the 2023 deal, will collectively own approximately 59.2% of the combined company.

The strategic logic centers on scale. EverBank operates predominantly as a digital bank with a few dozen branches concentrated in Florida and California. WaFd, recently rebranded from Washington Federal Bank and headquartered in Seattle, brings a physical network of more than 200 branches across Washington, Oregon, and other Western states. The two CEOs — EverBank's Greg Seibly and WaFd's Brent Beardall — reportedly bonded over dinner on the shared conviction that mid-sized banks face existential pressure to grow. Seibly put it bluntly: banks need to get bigger to survive, and many institutions are confronting the same crossroads.