Terry Turner is CEO of Pinnacle Financial Partners.Less than 18 months after completing its $187 million purchase of CapitalMark Bank in Chattanooga, the parent company of Pinnacle Bank is planning a major expansion into Virginia and the Carolinas through a $1.9 billion purchase of BNC Bancorp, the parent company of the Bank of North Carolina.
The purchase, which has already been approved by the boards of directors for both banks and is expected to be completed this fall, would give the Nashville-based Pinnacle Financial Partners a footprint in four states and in a dozen of the top markets in the Southeast. The combination of the two banks, each of which are among the fastest growing in their respective states, will create a bank with $20 billion in assets.
Pinnacle CEO Terry Turner said the combined bank will be ideally positioned to compete with major regional banks in the South and he forecasts the merger should help boost Pinnacle’s per-share earnings by 10 percent in 2018.
Pinnacle has made bank acquisitions in Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville in the past couple of years, but the purchase of BNC Bancorp will be its biggest acquisition so far. To help fund the merger and future acquisitions, Pinnacle announced Monday it will also issue $175 million of stock.
BNC Bancorp is the holding company for the Bank of North Carolina, which is based in High Point, N.C., with $6.8 billion in assets, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Bank of North Carolina has 76 offices across its three-state footprint, including Charlotte, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; and Charleston, S.C.