Customers at 34 Kroger and Wal-Mart stores in Georgia will no longer be able to take care of their banking business in the stores’ BestBank branches after its parent bank in Wisconsin failed.
Federal regulators closed Milwaukee-based Guaranty Bank, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The bank operated 119 branches in five states under the BestBank or Guaranty Bank names, mostly in grocery stores.
The failure Friday evening resulted in the closure of 34 BestBank branches in Georgia, most of them in metro Atlanta.
The FDIC, a federal agency that guarantees bank customers’ deposits up to $250,000, said Raleigh, N.C.-based First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company bought Guaranty Bank’s deposits. A dozen of Guaranty Bank’s free-standing branches in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois will remain open.
The FDIC also said all of Guaranty Bank’s customers, no matter where they did business, will become First-Citizens Bank & Trust’s customers.
However, the agency said all of failed bank’s 107 store-based branches will remain closed. The bank operated as BestBank in Georgia and Michigan, and as Guaranty bank in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois.
Customers with questions about the bank failure can call the FDIC toll-free at 800-930-6827, or find more details at the FDIC's website on failed banks.
The FDIC said Guaranty Bank had $1 billion in assets and $1 billion in deposits. First-Citizens agreed to buy almost $893 million on the bank’s assets such as loans and branches.
The FDIC is keeping the rest of the bank’s assets — typically loans to borrowers who have defaulted and foreclosed properties. They appear to be a total write-off: the FDIC estimated that Guaranty Bank’s failure will cost its deposit insurance fund $146 million.
Guaranty Bank is the fifth to fail in the United States this year, and the first in fail in Wisconsin in more than a year.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, Georgia became the nation’s bank failure capital. Between 2008 and 2014, nearly 90 institutions were shut down or turned over to new owners by the FDIC. But the pace has slowed to a trickle in recent years.
The last Georgia bank to fail was Woodbury Banking Co., last August.
