No laughing matter.

Among banks, Synovus Financial Corp. keeps a pretty low profile. It’s got just 280 branches, all in states that don’t matter. It operates those branches under 28 different monikers, only two of which actually include the ridiculous word “Synovus.” It has fewer total ATMs than Chase does south of 14th Street. And it took less than $1 billion in TARP money. Small potatoes, indeed. Small enough, it may have thought, to escape the avenging eye of bank-analyzing superhero Mike Mayo, who was undoubtedly too busy figuring out how Mike Corbat is screwing up this time to pay attention to its decision to give CEO Kessel Stelling a little bump for its loan growth. But all that proves is that the people running Synovus don’t know Mike Mayo at all.

“It seems remarkable that a company with prior poor loan quality would include this in a plan,” Mr. Mayo said in an interview….Mr. Mayo said in an interview that the incentive was “unique” among Synovus’s peers and “has the potential to encourage excess risk taking.”

“It’s unfathomable to think that a bank would have pay connected to specific loan growth targets after the financial crisis,” he added.

Mike Mayo Slams ‘Unfathomable’ Executive Pay Plan at Synovus [WSJ MoneyBeat blog]