While Atlantic Union Bankshares remains busy integrating its
"I think of the story of AUB as having three chapters," Asbury told American Banker. Chapters one and two involved expanding across Virginia, then Maryland, covering what Asbury calls the Golden Crescent, from Baltimore to Richmond, and south to the Hampton Roads region.
"We've done that," Asbury said. "We're now the number-one regional bank by depository market share in Maryland. We're the number-one regional bank by depository market share in Virginia. We're in all the places we need to be."
The Richmond, Virginia-based bank's next frontier is North Carolina and South Carolina. "We push south and make the investment in the Carolinas over time. That will be the next big thing," Asbury said.
"We've already opened a Wilmington commercial banking office," he said. "We're investing in the teams there. We're hiring. We're assessing what we refer to as the Carolinas expansion strategy, much of which will be organic — at least in the near term."
While regional banks haven't done many M&A deals the past few years, Asbury believes the hiatus is likely to end soon. "I think we're going to see some larger banks, including superregionals, test the water, because now would be the time to do it," he said.
"There's a perception — and I'm in this camp — that the window is open, and the window could close again. That's going to motivate some consolidation that perhaps wouldn't have occurred a year ago."
Asbury has been a man in a hurry since
Asbury had been CEO at First National Bank of Santa Fe in New Mexico, and he'd held executive positions at Regions Financial, Bank of America and Wachovia. But he'd begun his banking career in Richmond at United Virginia Bankshares.
United Virginia, known later as Crestar, was one of six big Virginia-based regional banks that were merged out of existence in the 1990s and early 2000s. Recreating what he termed the "great Virginia regional bank" became Asbury's first mission at Atlantic Union.
"There was an opening," Asbury said on a recent American Bankers Association
Asbury succeeded, thanks largely to three strategic acquisitions.
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Sandy Spring was bigger and more significant than Atlantic Union's previous merger-and-acquisition transactions under Asbury. The deal achieved "in one fell swoop" the Golden Crescent strategy Asbury had mulled for a decade, giving it a footprint stretching from Baltimore south into North Carolina.
David Bishop, an analyst who covers the Atlantic Union for Hovde, described the combined bank as "a premier player within the Regional banking landscape of the Mid-Atlantic."
The company "is now positioned to adroitly compete against both the larger, superregionals and smaller community banks that populate its broader footprint as we believe its relationship banking core is enhanced," he wrote in a research note.
Though the planned southward push is very much on Asbury's mind, he said Atlantic Union would pause its growth efforts for a time as it integrates Sandy Spring, which had 53 branches and $14.4 billion of assets when Atlantic Union announced the combination in October.
"You'll see us pause after Sandy Spring and go through the shakedown cruise," Asbury said. "When the Navy builds a new ship in Norfolk, they launch it and do shake, rattle and roll testing. That's what they call it. We'll make sure everything works as it should. Also, we need to see the environment settle down."
That said, once Atlantic Union finishes ironing out any wrinkles from the Sandy Spring deal, Asbury isn't ruling out additional M&A — either to fill in pockets in Virginia and Maryland, or to speed the pace of expansion in the Carolinas.
Asbury described himself as "bullish" on Atlantic Union's post-merger franchise, which adds Baltimore and Washington, D.C.'s Maryland suburbs to its legacy Virginia markets. Asbury acknowledged the disruption triggered by the Trump administration's plans to trim federal spending and employment, but he insisted that the long-term outlook for the Washington metropolitan statistical area remains bright.
"There are 6 million people in the Greater Washington MSA," Asbury said. "The current unemployment rate is 3.5%. That's one of the lowest unemployment rates of any major large MSA in America. The Baltimore-Towson-Columbia, Maryland, MSA is even better with an unemployment rate of 3.2"
Some of Atlantic Union's brightest opportunities may lie in Baltimore, where the bank is looking to establish a branch. The combined company is better suited to capitalize on the city's more industrial economy, Asbury said.
"We have lots of tools that Sandy Spring did not have, such as our equipment finance business," Asbury said. "We're a top 40 bank-owned equipment finance company. We're proud of that. We can lease tugboats and barges and dry docks and cranes and rolling stock. … We do that at the Port of Virginia or in Hampton Roads today."
Atlantic Union has exposure to the federal government through its government contracting business line, but its lending focuses primarily on defense firms, which are unlikely to be impacted significantly by the Trump administration's cutbacks.
"We haven't seen any problems in that set," Asbury said.
Despite the Sandy Spring acquisition's scale, Asbury is confident the integration and upcoming systems conversion will proceed smoothly, if for no other reason than the fact that it is Atlantic Union's third in little more than a year. The company consolidated American National last year, then engaged in an in-house process, moving its sizable consumer-banking client base onto a new online banking platform earlier this spring.
"We understand conversions, and we learn things," Asbury said. "I'll tell you, there were mighty lessons learned in each of these events."
Indeed, one of the key lessons that emerged from the American National experience was that new customers aren't as inclined to read the materials an acquiring bank sends them, according to Asbury. Atlantic Union produced a detailed booklet explaining how to navigate the transition, but it went largely unread, he admitted.
This year, for its in-house conversion, Atlantic Union distributed a scaled-down quick-start guide similar to the ones device makers provide new customers. "You might have a QR code, but that quick-start guide is going to say, 'Here's the three or four things you need to do,'" Asbury said. "That's what we [needed] to do, make it as intuitive as possible. And it worked."
"The angst that we have [about conversions] is more about the client experience, educating the client, making it simple," he said. "I am less concerned about having problems with the technology transfer, getting the data right, which we're very good at."
