A Capital One Financial Corp. executive said investors have generally been positive about the company’s plans to acquire Discover Financial Services, focusing their questions primarily on the regulatory hurdles ahead of the deal’s approval.
Jeff Norris, the bank’s senior vice president of global finance, shed more light on the biggest deal of the year while speaking at the RBC Capital Markets Global Financial Institutions Conference in New York on Tuesday. Given that both Capital One and Discover are publicly traded, independent companies, direct contact between the two firms is extremely limited ahead of approval by US regulators, Norris said.
“What we’re doing is extensive planning and preparation on our side,” he said, so that when the deal is completed “we’ll be ready to hit the ground running.”
Norris also said McLean, Virginia-based Capital One conducted “thousands and thousands” of hours of due diligence ahead of reaching the $35 billion deal that would create the largest credit-card issuer in the US by loan volume.
“The opportunity there is to grow transactional relationships,” he said.
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