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ORLANDO - George Koehn recalls the glee that some rivals showed 15 summers ago, when Orlandobased SunBanks joined with Trust Company of Georgia in banking's first big interstate merger.
Although Orlando would remain the base for Florida operations under that historic deal, the new SunTrust Banks chose Atlanta for its headquarters.
"Barnett was running ads showing a truck with a Trust Company sign backing into Florida and getting ready to take things up to Georgia I " recalls Koehn, SunTrust's president for Florida operations and chairman and CEO for Central Florida.
Fifteen years later, SunTrust bankers can smile at the irony of how that turned out.
As it nears its 15th anniversary, bankers and analysts alike share a widespread view that SunTrust has surpassed its mega-rivals in keeping a heavy level of authority in Florida.
Today, the bank's headquarters on Orange Avenue includes its national offices for retirement services and several investment management units. SunTrust has more than 10,000 Florida employees,
about 6,000 in its five-county Central Florida region - numbers that have grown severalfold since Barnett first warned that trucks might roll up I-75 and take much of Sun away.
Now, 15 years and counting from the groundbreaking merger, Koehn says SunTrust's goal is to keep as much local control as possible - even though the holding company this year gave up its separate banking charters in Orlando and 11 other Florida cities.
"I think SunTrust is correct when it says that it has provided more of a local flavor (than other major banks)," says Christopher Marinac, an analyst with Robinson-Humphrey in Atlanta. "I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that...