Univest Corporation Acquires Fox Chase Bancorp, Inc.
Univest Corporation of Pennsylvania (NASDAQ: UVSP), headquartered in Souderton, Pennsylvania, is a community banking and financial services company serving customers through 38 locations in Lehigh, Bucks, Philadelphia and Montgomery counties.
Univest’s acquisition of Fox Chase Bancorp, Inc., creates the ninth largest Pennsylvania headquartered bank and the largest super-community bank franchise in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The acquisition provides Univest further market density in areas that it currently serves and strengthens Univest’s commercial lending division with an experienced middle market lending team.
The combined franchise will be well-positioned to take advantage of the market dislocation created by sales of larger community banks to out-of-market buyers.
The acquisition is approximately 7% accretive to earnings in 2017. The strong earnings accretion serves to earn back TBV dilution in less than 5 years and results in an internal rate of return of approximately 16%.