Pinnacle Financial now expands into Whitehaven, Raleigh
Pinnacle Financial Partners has put loan offices in Raleigh and Whitehaven, continuing its rapid Memphis expansion since the purchase of a small east-side bank three years ago.
Pinnacle announced on Wednesday the loan production offices have opened in the two Memphis neighborhoods.
New offices mark the bank’s first venture into middleand working-class areas beyond the affluent Poplar Corridor commercial district in East Memphis where the acquired Magna Bank focused its business.
Pinnacle, the largest bank based in Nashville, has steadily expanded in Memphis, first by luring local bankers from Memphis-based First Tennessee Bank and then landing the high-profile business sponsorship of the Memphis Grizzlies basketball franchise. More recently it opened a major office building in the busy Poplar Corridor prominently displaying the Pinnacle logo and reportedly doubled Memphis loan volume to nearly $1 billion from Magna’s
$460 million level.
In a statement released Wednesday, the Nashville bank says Tracy MitchellEllis will lead a team of small-business and mortgage lenders in the 3,000square-foot Whitehaven office at 4403 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Zaundria Ingram will lead the small-business and mortgage lenders in the Raleigh office at 2235 Whitten Road.
“Whitehaven and Raleigh are communities that deserve a strong bank that can give access to financing for entrepreneurs and homeowners,” said Herman Strickland, head of Pinnacle’s client advisory group in Memphis, adding: “These offices bring us closer to communities that previously didn’t have easy access to Pinnacle services.”
Strickland was among the First Tennessee bankers identified in the Memphis bank’s 2016 lawsuit that contends Pinnacle conspired to lure its employees. First Tennessee and Pinnacle later settled the lawsuit quietly and Pinnacle made a public apology.
In opening in the Raleigh area’s 38133 Zip Code, Pinnacle located in a neighborhood with one of the highest concentrations of middle-class Hispanic households in metropolitan Memphis.
Hispanics with an average household income of $50,600 accounted for almost 10 percent of the residents in that Zip Code, says a 2016 U.S. Census report.
The area spreads into Bartlett, the 10th largest city in Tennessee, and is filled primarily with white households. Property values in that area surged 59 percent between 2004 and 2014, the Census report shows.
Whitehaven, home to a large share of Memphis’ middle-class African American population, has an average household income of about $38,000 in Zip Code 38116, the Census report shows, with the bulk of the working people employed by industrial and logistics companies.
The bank’s loan office includes a learning center for financial workshops and seminars for clients in the area. The learning center is also available for general public use, the bank said.
The Nashville bank, which paid $83 million for Magna in April 2015, inherited the smaller bank’s limited network of branch offices and managed to still sharply lift loan volume by looking for commercial loans and recruiting able bankers, the same strategy used to become the largest homegrown bank in Nashville since its 2000 founding, Pinnacle chief executive Terry Turner said in a January interview.
Pinnacle’s rapid increase in loan volume counters the broader trend in Greater Memphis of moderate loan growth despite a marked improvement in the unemployment rate.
Among the 23 banks based in the nine-county metro area, loans last year totaled $34 billion, up $9 billion from the year before, although this number includes lending outside the metro area.
First Tennessee’s $28.3 billion in loans accounted for almost all the increase through the purchase of a North Carolina bank and loan production offices located in major cities throughout the Southeast.
Not counting First Tennessee, lending among the 22 community banks based in metro Memphis rose about 6 percent to total $5.7 billion last year, about $300,000 more than in 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported. Those loans are made primarily to Greater Memphis customers. The report does not show the volume of loans made in the Memphis area by banks based outside the region.
In the nine-county Memphis metro area, January’s jobless rate dipped to 4.2 percent, the lowest rate for any January since the 3.9-percent rate measured in 1999.
In all, 600,300 residents in Greater Memphis reported they had full- or part-time jobs in January, a gain of 11,000 jobs in a year, and the highest job count ever reported for any January in any year in the metro area. In January 2017, the unemployment rate in metro Memphis measured 6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.