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When Atlantic Union Bank completed its $14 billion acquisition of Sandy Spring Bancorp last year, call center volume was back to normal in six days. That almost never happens in a bank merger.
Matt Linderman, the bank's CIO, credits much of that success to what he calls innovation 'with a little i.' Prior to joining Atlantic Union in 2023, he had spent 20 years working at large banks including Capital One and PNC, places where the solution to most problems is to go out and buy the most cutting-edge technology, he said.
He surprised a lot of colleagues when he opted to move to a smaller, regional bank. His rationale was simple: "I want to make a big impact, which is just hard to do at a big institution."
That meant working within tighter constraints. "At a regional scale, we're not going to have the funding to buy all the latest tech. So it's important to think about lowercase-i innovation' — how do we innovate within the tech we already have? How do we make a difference by rethinking what we're already doing,?" Linderman asked.
The Sandy Spring merger, which was the largest in Atlantic Union's history, presented a key opportunity to rethink the process of combining organizations and automating workflows. Linderman and his team started examining how to better migrate the data, how to validate it and how to maintain its quality. Next, they automated the entire process of converting and checking every piece of data, column by column and field by field.
Normally in a banking conversion, a sampling of maybe 10% of fields and 10% of values are spot-checked manually, he explained. Instead, he and his 10-person team created automated checks around every value, every column and every field, at scale.
"We built code that doesn't sample," Linderman said. "That equated to checking more than 80 million values. There was a level of lowercase-i innovation there that was really meaningful."
Atlantic Union paired its automated validation system with a real-time dashboard tracking call center volumes and other operational metrics, giving Linderman's team an early warning system for problems. He said that as a result, the call center's abandonment rate came in at 13%, far lower than the projected 50% to 70%, with average wait times under four minutes. The bank got more than 66,000 calls in October, 2025, the month it merged with Sandy Spring, but monthly call volumes are typically around 35,000.
"We were back at [typical] call volumes within six days, which is unheard of," he said. The industry standard is generally measured in weeks or months.
Linderman added that he also bucked bank-merger norms by deciding to completely unify the two bank systems from the beginning. "In a lot of major bank acquisitions and conversions, systems end up running in parallel post-acquisition," he explained. "We didn't want to leave anything hanging."
That clean merger execution helped the bank avoid the integration costs that can erode acquisition-year earnings. Atlantic Union's 2025 net income hit $261.8 million, up 33% from 2024.
Linderman also has capital-i innovations in the works to drive the 123-year-old bank's digital transformation.
"We've got a pretty audacious AI agenda," he said.
The bank's first major deployment will use AI to monitor call-center recordings. The plan is to shift from a manual review of about 10% of calls to monitoring 100% of them. The aim is to have AI screen every single call and flag what's working and what's not, in order to improve training.
But Linderman's work on the Sandy Spring deal is a good reminder that not every upgrade requires the latest and greatest technology.
"There are a lot of areas where we're so hyped on Gen AI that we lose sight of machine learning practices that have been around for 20 to 30 years," Linderman said. "And they can solve problems that don't require Gen AI."
