The Synovus Financial Corporation is a financial services company with approximately $27 billion in assets based in Columbus, Georgia. This company began with its original name " Columbus Bank and Trust Company". Synovus’ divisions provide commercial and retail banking, investment, and mortgage services to customers through 29 locally branded divisions, 280 offices, and more than 400 ATMs in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee.

The company began in 1888 with an encounter between a worker and an executive at a Columbus, Georgia textile mill.

The worker’s dress became tangled in factory machinery, and money she had sewn into her hem spilled onto the floor. Explaining she felt this was the safest place to keep her savings, a mill executive offered instead to secure her money in the mill safe and pay her interest. That same service was soon offered to all the workers, and those deposits marked the beginning of Synovus.

The company built a comprehensive financial services company that today operates in five states across the Southeast.

In mid-August 2009 the bank was named as one of the biggest of more than 150 U.S. lenders which owned nonperforming loans equal to 5 percent or more of their holdings. Five percent is a threshold that former regulators have stated can wipe out a bank’s equity and threaten its survival.

As a result of their financial troubles, Synovus laid off 850 employees and closed many bank branches in early 2011. In July 2013, Synovus repaid the US government $967.9 million borrowed under TARP Troubled Asset Relief Program .

In early 2010, Synovus consolidated their thirty separate state charters into one Georgia state banking charter and is transitioning to operate as a more centralized single bank.