FirstBank stock opens higher in first day of stock trading

photo Jim Ayers, chairman of FirstBank, meets with reporter Ellis Smith before a luncheon at the Hunter Museum of American Art.

Tennessee's third biggest bank became a publicly traded company Friday and investors bid up the company's stock price by 9.2 percent during its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

FB Financial Corp., the parent company of FirstBank, opened Friday at $21.15 per share, well above the initial projected price of $16 to $18 per share, and closed at $20.75 per share.

FirstBank Chairman Jim Ayers, the former nursing home operator who bought a small Lexington, Tenn., bank in 1984 and built it into Tennessee's biggest privately held banks, said taking the company public will provide more currency for FB Financial to make future acquisitions and attract high-level bankers more easily.

The stock issue will generate somewhere between $111.8 million and and $128.5 million, depending upon how much of the options are exercised by those handling the initial public offering. Ayers will get $65 million from the offering, which he said will repay a $10 million personal loan to the bank and another $55 million in business taxes paid since he acquired the former Farmers State Bank 32 years ago and added First National Bank of Lexington four years later.

"We're all excited," Ayers said in a telephone interview from the NYSE in New York City on Friday. "For most of us, it's a new world in the public arena."

Ayers, who until Friday was the sole owner of FB Financial, said becoming a stock-traded bank will give FirstBank the currency and liquidity it needs to arrange different types of bank purchase agreements in the future and to provide stock-based compensation and rewards to attract and retain top bank managers.

"We need a currency to do acquisitions," Ayers said. "In the past we've done several acquisitions, but it had to be done for all cash and that sometimes is difficult."

FirstBank CEO Chris Holmes said the bank has no agreements yet for additional acquisitions. But the stock offering will give FB Financial more equity and liquidity to facilitate more bank purchases.

Some bankers selling their businesses prefer stock swaps rather than cash or some combination of stock and cash, Ayers said.

"We also need a currency to give in the form of options or grants to really high-performing new employees," Ayers said. "We need to have that tool to engage the kind of people we have and the kind of people we are going to need more of in the future."

FirstBank acquired the former Northwest Georgia Bank in Ringgold, Ga., last year and renamed the Ringgold bank to FirstBank this spring. FirstBank operates six branches in metropolitan Chattanooga, where it has more than $330 million in deposits.

Ayers has grown his bank through a series of bank acquisitions and market expansions over the past three decades to include $2.9 billion in assets. FirstBank now operates 45 branches across Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia with banks in the metro markets in Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, Jackson and Huntsville, Ala.

Asked how long he hopes to stay with the bank, the 72-year-old Ayers said he has no plans at this time to retire.

"Right now, the plan is 20 more years," he said. "I'm going to stay with it as long as I am healthy enough to keeping working. I would not know what to do if I didn't have a place to work."

FirstBank was one of two bank initial public stock offerings on Friday. The Bank of N.T. Butterfield in the Bahamas debuted Friday and its shares rose 5.3 pecent to $24.75 per share.

The bank stocks rose after their initial public offerings despite an overall decline in the stock market on Friday.

Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.

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