SOUTH STATE HEADS NORTH: SOUTH CAROLINA'S BIGGEST BANK BETS ON CHARLOTTE AND RICHMOND FOR PEPPIER GROWTH.

AuthorDykes, David
PositionNC TREND: Money talk: North Carolina's financial set

It took South State Corp., the largest community banking company based in the Carolinas, a long time to live up to its name. Formed in 1934, the company adopted its current name in 2014 after merging its five banks that had different brands. The Columbia, S.C.-based company had grown substantially in South Carolina and small slices of Georgia and North Carolina over the last two decades. But South State's $690 million acquisition of Charlotte-based Park Sterling Corp. last December expanded South State's asset size by about 30% and raised its business and profile significantly in Charlotte, Raleigh and Richmond, Va. It also prompted the company to plant its bank president, Greg Lapointe, in the Queen City. Lapointe is succeeding John Windley, who is retiring in March after 43 years in banking.

"It gets a senior leader in a very important, critical state in North Carolina and, candidly, it gets me more centralized where it's easier to get to the other cities in North Carolina," says Lapointe, who worked for Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. for a combined 25 years before joining South State in 2009. "It was a logical next step for our company."

South State entered North Carolina in 2007 by purchasing Charlotte-based The Scottish Bank, renaming it North Carolina Bank and Trust. At the time of the Park Sterling acquisition, it had about $570 million in deposits in the Charlotte market. Four other regions--Augusta, Ga., and Charleston, Greenville and Hilton Head, S.C.--were then larger than Charlotte.

Post-merger, Charlotte is the state's biggest deposit market with more than $1.5 billion in the vaults, CEO Robert Hill Jr. told analysts in October. "We've got a lot of traction building," he said. South State now employs about 300 people in the Charlotte area.

While its roots are in smaller cities in South Carolina, South State now relies on Charleston, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh and Richmond for more than 60% of its overall lending, according to bank officials. In the counties in which it operates in four states, South State has more combined deposits than all but three other banks with offices in the same markets.

South State positions itself as more diversified than other community banks and more customer-friendly than regional and national institutions that dominate the industry. With $14.5 billion in assets, it is about 150% larger than Southern Pines-based First Bancorp, the largest N.C.-based community lender.

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