James E. Rohr, the chairman and chief executive officer of PNC Financial Services Group Inc., has been named American Banker's Banker of the Year for 2007.
Under Mr. Rohr, PNC has stood out in the industry by setting an aggressive course, expanding while many rivals are focused on playing it safe. The award also acknowledges PNC's efforts to put to productive use the painful lessons it learned during a run-in with regulators earlier this decade.
After beefing up management and improving the company's risk-management systems, Mr. Rohr drove a hard bargain for Riggs National Bank, which moved PNC into the profitable Washington, D.C., market. PNC got high marks for the integration, which included cleaning up Riggs' own regulatory problems, and then announced two more deals last summer, both also opportunistic bids for troubled banks (New Jersey's Yardville National Bank and Pennsylvania's Sterling Financial Corp.).
PNC has not confined its acquisition interest to troubled institutions. It bought Mercantile Bankshares Corp. of Baltimore in March 2007, adding 500,000 consumer accounts in Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Virginia.
The conversion of 231 Mercantile affiliate branches to PNC Bank offices last month gave PNC one of the largest branch networks in Maryland.
PNC funded its deals in part by paring down what had turned out to be an extremely lucrative investment in BlackRock Inc. PNC bought the asset manager for $240 million in 1995 and recorded a $1.3 billion gain when it merged the investment company with Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.'s asset management business. PNC retained a 34% stake in the combined company, which continues to buoy the Pittsburgh banking company's fee income.
Mr Rohr, who in 2001 became chairman of PNC, now a $126 billion-asset company, also led its execution of its "One PNC" program, which reduced expenses by $300 million and boosted revenue growth by $100 million. The company has reported first-half 2007 earnings of $882 million, up 20% from the year earlier. Loans and deposits were up 27% and 25%, respectively, in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. And credit quality has remained solid.
The award for Mr. Rohr will be among six bestowed on industry leaders at this year's Banker of The Year Awards gala. The others include Community Banker of the Year and Lifetime Achievement awards. The honorees will receive their awards at the Best in Banking dinner and ceremony on Nov. 29 in the Pierre Hotel in New York City.
