FNB Corp. is the latest bank to plot growth in the Southeast

FNB Corp. is adding almost 30 new branches to its Southeast and Mid-Atlantic footprint, doubling down on its big bet on the region — a strategy shared by several other lenders.

Over the next five years, FNB plans to open new locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., the Pittsburgh-based bank announced on Tuesday, bolstering a presence that it’s been building over the past decade.

“These branches are basically augmenting our existing delivery channel, and in some instances filling in a void that we have,” FNB CEO Vincent Delie said in an interview.

FNB, the $50 billion-asset parent company of First National Bank, has a total of 350 branches across the Eastern U.S., and it has been steadily building up its Southeast network. In 2017, FNB entered the North Carolina market by acquiring Yadkin Financial, the state’s largest community bank at the time. In 2022, it purchased UB Bancorp, the parent company of North Carolina’s Union Bank.

That same year, FNB reached a deal to become the sole provider of ATMs in Washington, D.C.’s subway system.

FNB is far from the only regional bank to see opportunity in the Southeast. In 2024, Fifth Third Bancorp announced plans to open 31 new branches in the region. In April of this year, Huntington Bancshares said it would add 55 locations in the Carolinas. And just last month, Truist Financial announced plans to open 100 new branches, mostly in the Southeast. 

For banks, one big draw of the Southeast is the growing number of consumers who live there. From 2023 to 2024, North Carolina and South Carolina were both among the 10 states with the highest population growth, according to the Pew Research Center.

“The Southeast in general looks pretty good from an unemployment standpoint, from a population income growth standpoint,” said David Smith, an analyst at Truist Securities. “That tends to translate well to bank lending and deposit formation.”

Even as the Southeast banking market grows more crowded, FNB is bullish that it can handle the pressure.

“I think there’s room for the competition there,” Delie said. “We have done an analysis in the past to look at the competitive climate in the markets that we’re in … and we were pretty confident that we could thrive in those markets.”

One differentiator for FNB, Smith said, could be its technology. At the new branches slated to open in the Southeast, customers will have access to both the “eStore,” the bank’s digital platform for buying products and services, and so-called interactive teller machines that allow users to chat with employees by video.

“They’ve made some interesting investments from the technology and digital standpoint in recent years,” Smith said. “FNB, I think, really stands out amongst the banks of its size.”

As the bank builds more brick-and-mortar outposts in the Southeast, Delie said, a key way it hopes to attract and hold onto clients is by offering its services both digitally and in person.

“They kind of go hand in hand,” Delie said, referring to the bank’s strategy as “Clicks to Bricks.”

“We felt it was important to ensure that the delivery channel matched the digital channel in terms of convenience,” he said, “and we feel pretty strongly that strategically placed branches are still important in our business model.”