Fifth Third's old-school plan to keep Comerica customers

• Key Insight: After acquiring Comerica, Fifth Third plans to use paper mailers as well as digital marketing to reach consumers in the Western U.S.
• Supporting Data: In 2026, the bank plans to send out 13 million-to-14 million mailers to advertise consumer deposit accounts.
• Expert Quote: "Mail still works," said Fifth Third CEO Tim Spence.

As Fifth Third Bancorp nears the completion of its Comerica acquisition, it's planning to use every tool in its arsenal to retain the selling bank's customers. One of those tools: good old-fashioned mail.

Over the course of 2026, Fifth Third CEO Tim Spence said on Tuesday, the Cincinnati-based bank plans to send out 13 million-to-14 million pieces of paper mail in Comerica's Western markets, in an effort to hold onto consumer deposit accounts. Of those mailers, one million will be dispatched just in the first two weeks of February.

"Mail still works," Spence said during the bank's fourth quarter earnings call. "It works in credit cards. It works in checking. It's the reason that you see the JPMorgans of the world continuing to use it, in addition to folks like Fifth Third."

Fifth Third announced in October 2025 that it was purchasing Dallas-based Comerica, and the merger cleared its final regulatory hurdles earlier this month. The combined bank will have around $290 billion of assets, making it the 16th-largest depository institution in the country.

Comerica has branches in Arizona, California and Texas, among other states, offering Fifth Third significant opportunities to expand its footprint in the Southwest, as it has previously been doing in the Southeast. That's assuming the bank can keep — and build on — Comerica's base of commercial and retail customers.

In an interview Tuesday with American Banker, Spence said that the millions of mailers planned for this year will target consumers with deposit accounts, offering them cash bonuses and promotional rates to stay at or switch to Fifth Third.

"It is literally the same set of tactics that we have been using to support the buildout in the Southeast," Spence said. "The same playbook … will drive, we think, the same sort of outcomes in Texas and eventually California."

According to Spence, Fifth Third's direct marketing is done in a 50/50 fashion — half mail, half digital. In the case of existing Comerica customers, the mail half is a matter of necessity.

"Comerica didn't have the ability to open an account digitally, which obviously is a critical part of a digital offer," Spence said during the interview. "We do."

Fifth Third now expects its post-merger systems conversion to finish at approximately the end of this year's third quarter. Until then, paper mailers will help Comerica's customers set up their digital accounts.

"From February 1 to September, everything we do to support them will be mail-based," Spence said.

The snail-mail approach offers some advantages over more modern methods.

During Tuesday's earnings call, Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo ribbed Spence over his old-fashioned approach, calling it "very last century." Spence responded that mail may be old, but it's also precise.

"The benefit of direct mail is that you can literally pick, down to the individual household, who receives the offer and who doesn't," the CEO said, "whereas in a digital environment, you have a lot more data on folks, but you are still, at the end of the day, optimizing around the segments of the population."

In terms of the most recent quarter, Fifth Third generally surpassed Wall Street's expectations. In the final three months of 2025, the company's earnings per diluted share reached $1.04, ahead of analysts' consensus estimate of 99 cents, according to S&P.

Net income for the quarter was $699 million, comfortably exceeding the $660.5 billion that analysts had forecast, per S&P. And total revenue came in at $2.344 billion, narrowly beating estimates of $2.338 billion.

After the call, Spence told American Banker that the quarter represented a "bookend" to one era of Fifth Third's history, just before it combines with Comerica.

"It's basically the last quarter where investors will have the opportunity to see what the old Fifth Third was," Spence said.