PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – PNC Bank is growing again.

After acquiring National City Bank just a few years ago, the Pittsburgh-based financial services company is now purchasing RBC Bank USA which is the U.S. retail banking subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada.

The deal will cost PNC some $3.45 billion but will add 424 branches in the Southeast, substantially increasing the size of the Pittsburgh-based bank.

Up until now, PNC has been primarily focused in the Northeast and Midwest with some presence in Virginia and Florida. The acquisition of RBC adds states like North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama to the PNC orbit and expands its presence in Virginia and Florida.

With this purchase, PNC will leapfrog the competition to become America’s fifth-largest retail bank in terms of branch offices with its 2,870 branches. Wells Fargo is the largest bank in the U.S. based on branch offices with 6,524. It’s followed by Bank of America with 5,956 branch offices, Chase with 5,362 branch offices and U.S .Bank with 3,146 branch offices.

Company officials also hailed the acquisition as a chance to expand their services to some of the wealthiest and fastest-growing parts of the country.

But for local PNC customers, perhaps the biggest advantage to this acquisition is that they will be able to use their PNC ATM cards at thousands of ATM machines up and down the East Coast.

If approved by government regulators, the deal should close sometime in March of 2012.

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