OUTLET: Inside Business
By Nate Delesline III
TowneBank has retained its status as the largest bank in Hampton Roads for a second year.
The bank held 22 percent of the region’s market share with $5.48 billion in deposits. Wells Fargo, with $4.73 billion in deposits, is second with a 19 percent share.
SunTrust, BB&T and Bank of America round out the region’s top five banks.
TowneBank will mark its 20th anniversary in 2019. Its chairman and CEO, G. Robert Aston Jr., recalled the early days during the bank’s annual shareholders’ meeting May 23 at the Virginia Beach Convention Center.
A few months before Towne began business in 1999, Nokia had the top-selling cell phone and Google was a new company. Bank of America, Wachovia (which Wells Fargo acquired), BB&T and SunTrust held 82 percent of the region’s deposits.
As of March, Towne had $10.62 billion in assets.
Aston said from 2014 to 2017, the bank’s assets went up 100 percent, net income increased 108 percent and its stock price went up 103 percent.
Acquisitions have given Towne a significant market share in Richmond, the Outer Banks, the Raleigh-Durham and the Charlotte metro areas. It employs more than 2,800 people; more than 2,000 of them work in Virginia. It completed its acquisition of Raleigh-based Paragon Bank in February.
Those market shares, Aston said, “give us a tremendous pathway to the future.”
Unlike the protagonist in the hit song “Wagon Wheel,” it took Towne 17 years – not 17 hours – to make it to Raleigh, President J. Morgan Davis told shareholders. But, he added, that’s OK because investments in people have more long-term influence on the company.
“We can buy technology, but it’s hard to buy people,” Davis said.
And folding new leadership into an existing company breathes life into new ideas, he added.
“The real reason that people would want to do business with a new company is really because you’re offering an opportunity to them for service that they’re not receiving,” Aston said. “We’re not the smartest guys in town,” he continued. “We don’t have all the answers. And the truth is, every day, we’re running a company that’s larger than any company we’ve ever run before.”
Five items requiring a vote were approved without discussion. Shareholders did not publicly make any comments or ask questions of Aston, Davis or the nearly two dozen other bank executives seated on stage.
Aston said Towne processes more than a million checks each month. That’s about the same number it handled five years ago. Cashless and check-free banking are future possibilities “but probably it will be an evolutionary process not a revolutionary process.”
“I think the most important thing for us, as we’ve gotten bigger, is not to lose what got us here in the first place,” Aston said as Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” boomed over the speakers in the meeting room.
