Flagstar's purchase of Signature assets won’t create redundancies: executive

Did Flagstar buy Signature Bank?

“We know Signature Bank very well,” Lee Smith, senior executive vice president and president of mortgage at Flagstar Bank, told Mortgage Professional America during a telephone interview. “They operate in the New York market and compete with New York Community Bank, and obviously Flagstar and New York Community Bank merged on December 1. There’s a lot of familiarity. They’re a great team, great people.”

He spoke of the complementary nature of the transaction: “The loans and the businesses we’ve acquired are complementary to our model and obviously bringing in the deposits transforms our deposit mix on the funding side of the balance sheet,” Smith said. “We’re very pleased with the transaction.

“We were able to move quickly because these processes are typically run over a short period of time. So we were very agile. We’re very excited we’ve been able to bring over a team we know – know very well – and have a lot of confidence in and being able to diversity our business model into new CNI business verticals and improve our deposit base.”

As part of the transaction, Flagstar also purchased Signature Bank’s wealth-management and broker dealer business, the parent company detailed. As a result of the deal, it’s adding various new verticals on the lending side, including healthcare lending, middle market specialty finance, and SBA lending.

What are redundancies in business?

MPA asked Smith if the complementary nature of the deal reduces the likelihood of redundancies that could lead to layoffs. His response: “The Signature model was different than the Flagstar model, so absolutely, yes.”