DBRS Upgrades All and Withdraws Most of Susquehanna Bancshares Ratings After Acquisition by BB&T

DBRS, Inc. (DBRS) has taken a number of rating actions following the completion of BB&T Corporation’s (BB&T) acquisition of Susquehanna Bancshares, Inc. (Susquehanna or the Company). Specifically, Susquehanna and its banking subsidiary, Susquehanna Bank have ceased to exist as legal entities. As such, DBRS upgraded and equalized the ratings of their debt with those of BB&T Corporation (BB&T) and Branch Banking and Trust, placed these ratings on Stable trend, and subsequently withdrew these ratings. Additionally, and following their assumption by BB&T, DBRS upgraded Susquehanna’s trust preferred securities to “A” from ‘BBB”, and placed these ratings on Stable trend.

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 (June 2015). Other applicable methodologies include the DBRS Criteria – Support Assessments for Banks and Banking Organisations (March 2015), and DBRS Criteria - Rating Bank Capital Securities – Subordinated, Hybrid, Preferred & Contingent Capital Securities (February2015). These can be found at: http://www.dbrs.com/about/methodologies.

The primary sources of information used for this rating include company documents 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: Mark Nolan
Rating Committee Chair: Roger Lister
Initial Rating Date: 7 March 2005
Most Recent Rating Update: 12 November 2014

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