Bank of America's acquisition of FleetBoston Financial will have no impact on the recent purchase of Circuit City's First North American National Bank Visa/MasterCard portfolio, analysts said. In fact, BofA's role as advisor in the FNANB purchase, combined with the fact that it acted as lead manager on all four of FNANB's term ABS, makes BofA the ideal fit, analysts said.
All told, the combined entity will have over $48 billion in general purpose credit card receivables, according to Banc One Capital Markets researcher Alessandro Pagani. Pagani theorizes that BofA may become a more frequent ABS issuer once the transaction closes, as the new entity would have just 26% of its managed credit card accounts securitized, which would be "the lowest percentage the top ten credit card companies," Pagani penned in a research report.
Fleet has been a quarterly issuer of credit card ABS since 1999, with $9.1 billion outstanding. BofA's BAMT shelf has issued just one term deal since 1999 and has $2.5 billion of ABS outstanding. FNANB has two deals outstanding, totaling roughly $1 billion. The three entities would combine to form the seventh largest credit card portfolio, behind Discover and ahead of Capital One Financial.
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