EverBank + Washington Federal = ?
September 9, 2026 | Over the Labor Day weekend, Gina Heeb at the Wall Street Journal got a nice scoop by reporting on the reverse merger between WaFD, Inc. (WAFD) and EverBank. The latter was bought from TIAA-CREF by a group of private-equity firms in 2023 and has assets of around $47 billion. Assuming the transaction is approved, the new bank will be added to the WGA Bank Top 50 test group.
The PE firms involved with EverBank included Stone Point Capital, Warburg Pincus, Reverence Capital Partners, Sixth Street and mortgage giant Bayview Asset Management. The group of investors and TIAA, which kept a stake in the 2023 sale, would collectively own around 59.2% of the combined company after the deal with WAFD, the WSJ reports.
WAFD will remain a publicly traded company in the deal, change its name to EverBank Financial and trade under the ticker “EVBK.” The fractious group of private-equity firms bought EverBank from the pension fund TIAA in 2023, but the club deal never really worked and the firms were reportedly at odds from the start. The obvious strategy was to let the veteran Warburg lead the deal, but apparently it was not meant to be.
Below for subscribers to our Premium Service, we talk about what this transaction means for the two banks and the US industry. As we noted in the most recent update to the WGA Bank Top 50, the banking sector has not participated in the strong US equity markets in 2026, unlike the stellar performance in 2025. No surprise, the WAFD stock has traded down since the transaction was announced.
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