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.”