Fed clears BancFirst to take over SpiritBank in an all-Oklahoma deal
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe Board of Governors said on 22 September 2026, for release at 4:30 p.m. EDT, that it had cleared BancFirst Corporation of Oklahoma City to buy and merge with Spirit BankCorp, Inc. of Bristow, Oklahoma, and through that transaction to come to own SpiritBank of Tulsa.
A second approval in the same notice covers the bank-level step: BancFirst, the subsidiary bank, may merge with SpiritBank and may open and run branches at every location SpiritBank currently operates. The reasoning sits in an order published as a separate PDF alongside the notice.
What it means
Two approvals in one release is the ordinary shape of a US bank deal, and the split matters. The first is a holding-company step under the Bank Holding Company Act — who may own the bank. The second is the bank merger itself, which is where the branch question lives. A deal can clear the first and be reshaped at the second, which is why the branch sentence is written out rather than assumed.
Everything here is in-state: Oklahoma City buying Bristow, absorbing a Tulsa bank. Geographic overlap is exactly what a competitive review examines, and the Board approving the branch network wholesale is a statement that it found nothing requiring divestiture. That is a finding about this transaction and nothing wider.
We are not reading a policy signal into it. A merger order is an adjudication on one application against statutory factors; it says nothing about rates, about the Board's view of bank consolidation generally, or about any other pending application. The detail of the factors weighed is in the order document itself.