N.C.-based Southern Bank continues Richmond push with first full-service branch

Southern Bank recently converted its lone local office into a full-service branch.

After making a fairly quiet entrance into the Richmond market two years ago, Southern Bank is looking to ramp things up.

The Mount Olive, North Carolina-based bank recently converted its local loan office into a full-service branch, its first in the area.

The change coincides with continued additions to its local team, which now counts six working out of its branch at 7130 Glen Forest Drive.

The $5 billion bank is led locally by John Neal, who joined as its lone Richmond employee in 2023 and has since been adding to its ranks.

John Neal

Neal, a Collegiate School and Hampden-Sydney College grad who was previously with South State Bank, SunTrust and BB&T, said Southern Bank initially followed the traditional route of starting in a new market with a loan production office.

But last summer, due in part to a subdued lending market overall, it decided to expand its capabilities and apply for regulatory approval for a full branch, which it officially opened last month.

The bank can now conduct the full array of transactions any customer might expect, including accepting deposits. Neal said the bank’s niche is in helping business customers with commercial loans, owner-occupied commercial real estate loans, business lines of credit and equipment loans.

Neal said the bank’s early growth here was fueled by relationships he had built during his time in the industry, along with commercial bankers Jeff Mead and David Younce, who joined in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

That same approach will continue, but the added branch capabilities will give the bank a boost.

“We’re an eastern Virginia, rural, down-home community bank with a very old-school relationship feel to it,” Neal said.

In addition to Neal, Younce and Mead, the Richmond team includes a branch manager, teller and loan assistant. The bank will continue to look to add talent, particularly for mortgages, treasury services and wealth advisory.

Southern Bank’s local branch is at 7130 Glen Forest Drive. (BizSense file photo)

Neal recognizes how competitive the Richmond market has become in recent years, with both locally based banks and plenty of out-of-town players like Southern Bank that have looked to markets like Richmond for growth.

“There are so many banks here in general you really have to set yourself apart with service and everyone here has to buy into that,” Neal said, adding that the bank hopes its recent listing atop Forbes Magazine’s “America’s Best Banks” rankings will help get its name out in a bigger way.

Founded in North Carolina in 1901, Southern Bank has dozens of branches around its home state, mainly east of Raleigh. It expanded into Virginia in 2011 by acquiring the assets of the former Bank of the Commonwealth in Norfolk.

Through that deal Southern Bank inherited 10 branches in Hampton Roads and several in eastern North Carolina.

As it looks to spread the word of its arrival in Richmond, Neal said broader economic variables make it a good time to be the new bank on the block.

“Banks are remaining very selective,” he said, due to higher interest rates and tightened lending standards. “Southern Bank is a conservative bank, but it’s allowed us to kind of weather some of the storms that have hit the industry the last few years.”

Neal said borrowers lately were starting to get more comfortable with elevated interested rates, but that the still-unknown impact of President Trump’s tariffs strategy is causing renewed caution.

“It think people are still on the sidelines a little bit to see where rates are going to go and see how this tariff thing shakes out and what it’s going to mean for interest rates,” Neal said, on a day when Trump warned that a near-term recession is a possibility to due to his economic policies.

In other local banking news, Strasburg, Virginia-based First Bank recently made a move to ramp up its local presence by hiring veteran local banker Joe Shearin as its Richmond market head.

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