DBRS Assigns BBB (high) rating to Valley National Bancorp’s Subordinated Debt; Trend Stable

DBRS, Inc. (DBRS) has today assigned a rating of BBB (high) with a Stable trend to Valley National Bancorp’s (Valley or the Company) $125 million subordinated debentures due September 27, 2023. The rating is positioned one notch below the Company’s Issuer & Senior Debt of A (low), which also carries a Stable trend. At the same time, DBRS assigned an A (low) rating to a previous subordinated debt issuance out of Valley National Bank (Deposits & Senior Debt rating of ‘A’ with a Stable trend). The notching for both issuances is consistent with DBRS’s base notching policy for subordinated debt.

Valley intends to use the proceeds of the $125 million sub debt offering to redeem the trust preferred securities associated with VNB Capital Trust that carry a 7.75% coupon.

Valley National Bancorp, a commercial bank headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey, had $16.0 billion in assets at June 30, 2013.

Notes:
All figures are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

The principal applicable methodology is the Global Methodology for Rating Banks and Banking Organisations. Other applicable methodologies include the DBRS Criteria: Intrinsic and Support Assessments and DBRS Criteria: Rating Bank Subordinated Debt & Hybrid Instruments with Discretionary Payments. These can be found can be found at: http://www.dbrs.com/about/methodologies

[Amended on June 18, 2014, to reflect actual methodologies used.]

The sources of information used for this rating include the company documents, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and SNL Financial. DBRS considers the information available to it for the purposes of providing this rating was of satisfactory quality.

This rating is endorsed by DBRS Ratings Limited for use in the European Union.

Lead Analyst: Michael Driscoll
Rating Committee Chair: Roger Lister
Initial Rating Date: 5 October 2009
Most Recent Rating Update: 8 March 2013

For additional information on this rating, please refer to the linking document under Related Research.