Aug. 20--Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA appears to have won the bidding for the assets of Guaranty Bank, the hobbled Texas lender, according to reports Wednesday by Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal.

The deal would mark the end for Guaranty, a bank backed by Dallas billionaire Robert Rowling and New York billionaire Carl Icahn. Guaranty, battered by the housing bust, said last month it was "critically undercapitalized" and probably couldn't stay in business.

Guaranty would give BBVA an expanded footprint in Texas and California, boosting an already significant presence in the Sun Belt. Guaranty has about 100 branches in Texas and about 60 in California.

"It really strengthens their position in Texas," said Dan Bass, an investment banker at Carson Medlin Co. in Houston, referring to BBVA. "The California piece is big for them."

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has been accepting bids for Guaranty's assets this month, according to banking analysts and executives.

Guaranty executives and FDIC officials could not be reached for comment. An official announcement is expected later this week.

A spokesman for BBVA Compass, a subsidiary of the Spanish bank based in Birmingham, Ala., declined to confirm that BBVA had won the bidding.

Another group said to be bidding for Guaranty was a private equity consortium led by Dallas billionaire Gerald Ford, who made his fortune in the banking business.

Toronto-Dominion Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also had expressed interest in Guaranty, according to a report this week by the Financial Times.

Guaranty had $13.5 billion in assets as of June 30, but its bad loans had soared in the last two years and it recently took substantial write-downs on some assets. The bank is technically based in Austin, but its top executives work in Dallas.

Guaranty would represent the second-largest bank failure of the year so far. Last week, regulators seized Colonial Bank of Montgomery, Ala., which had assets of $25 billion.

BBVA employs 112,000 people serving 47 million customers in more than 30 countries, according to its Web site. It is Spain's No. 2 bank by stock market value and has $750 billion in assets. It's also the largest bank in Mexico.

The Guaranty deal would fuel the Spanish bank's efforts to grow in the United States.

BBVA acquired Compass Bancshares Inc. for $9.6 billion in 2007 and recently rebranded its branches as BBVA Compass, with the Spanish bank's blue and white logo.