First Merchants Corp.
FRMEHIGH VELOCITYFILING INTENSITYFirst Merchants Corp. reads as an High Velocity (composite 78/100); Consistent Strategic Buyer deploying $342M across 1 disclosed transactions, running flat vs the prior cycle · primary market Regional Banking.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
$342M
vs $312M in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
1
2/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Consistent Strategic Buyer
Meaningful spend appears across repeat years.
Composite score
78
High Velocity dominates · Filing Intensity
Behavioral posture, nine reads.
Each index scores the issuer 0–100 against an EDGAR-anchored definition. Scores ≥ threshold elevate the issuer into the index's constituent set; the dominant index drives the masthead label.
Active Acquirer
Companies actively deploying disclosed capital into M&A
- $1.2B disclosed buyer spend
- Filed within 25d
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- Filed within 25d
- 486 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 1 divestiture 8-K
- Latest event 11y ago; heavily discounted
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 486 8-Ks
- Filed within 25d
- 4 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $4.1B
- 10-Q 25d ago
- 3 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($MM); ticks show recorded transaction count. Disclosure tier annotated where v6 audited corpus carries an entry.
Disclosed spend $MM Disclosed transactions (right axis)Peak spend year: $342M · Peak count: 1
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 1 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2024 | N/A | $342M | N/A | N/A |
| 2023 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2022 | 1 | $79M | $79M | N/A |
| 2021 | 1 | $3M | $3M | N/A |
| 2020 | 1 | $230M | $230M | N/A |
Strategy posture.
The buyer's playbook in terms of strategic archetype: what each disclosed move says about how they're deploying capital.
Archetype mix
- Horizontal Consolidation33%
- Geographic Expansion33%
- Bolt On33%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- horizontal_consolidation
- geographic_expansion
- bolt_on
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“Banks, securities firms and insurance companies can operate as affiliates under the umbrella of a financial holding company, which can offer a broad range of financial services, including banking, securities underwriting, insurance (both agency and underwriting) and merchant banking.”
“The financial services industry continues to become even more competitive as a result of legislative, regulatory and technological changes and continued consolidation.”
“The financial services industry has become increasingly competitive as a result of legislative, regulatory and technological changes and continued consolidation.”
“•merging or consolidating with another bank holding company; or”
Market context.
Where this issuer sits inside its SE-Cluster rollup wedge, with disclosed-spend rank plus trading comparables against the public peer set.
Primary market
Regional Banking
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $245.7B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $72.8B
- Recent vs prior
- +238%
- Issuer rank in market
- N/A
- Share of market capital
- 0.0%
Valuation positioning
FRME trades at a +4.5-turn premium to the Regional Banking peer median of 12.3×.
- EV / Revenue
- 3.9×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- N/A
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 12.3×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16.7× | 3.7× | -0.9× | $13.7B | $12.7B | |
First Merchants Corp.FRME | 16.7× | 3.9× | N/A | $1.1B | $342M |
| 13.9× | 3.0× | -0.7× | $58.4B | $126.1B | |
| 10.7× | 3.2× | -2.1× | $3.4B | $7B | |
| 9.3× | 2.2× | -0.3× | $14.5B | $72.6B |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Regional Banking. Bars scaled to the highest EV/EBITDA in the set.
Target landscape.
Public-issuer targets that fit this buyer's archetype and target categories from filing-derived signal. Scores reflect cross-signal fit; reasons cite the EDGAR-anchored facts that drove the match.
No qualifying public-issuer targets surfaced from the current signal mix.
Stated target categories
No target categories enumerated in the audited corpus for this issuer.
Filing activity & signal stream.
Filing cadence and event-driven signals visible on EDGAR. The signal stream below is curated from restatement / spin-carve / activism categories, providing context for any near-term call.
Filing cadence
- 10-K (annual)472026-02-25
- 10-Q (quarterly)1002026-05-01
- 8-K (event)4862026-04-22
- Proxy / DEF 14A362026-04-03
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)0N/A
Signals on file
- watch
Divestiture / strategic-alternatives 8-K
2015-06-151 8-K filing matching divestiture / strategic-alternatives language.
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
- info
Signal
10-K strategy themes
- info
Signal
Spin/Carve candidate
Audited corpus.
No audited record on file for this CIK in the current v6 corpus.
This issuer has not been extracted into the v6 audited acquirer corpus yet. The brief above pulls from ranking-level aggregates and issuer-index signal only.