Home-Grown Bank Grows
Published Feb 16, 2009
United Community Banks moved six operations and 145 employees into a new, 40,000-square-foot building in the Blairsville (Ga.) Airport Regional Industrial Park in 2008.
It was a fitting step for a bank that started modestly in 1950 as Union County Bank and now has 27 locally managed banks in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. The company started acquiring other banks in the mid-1990s and has grown into an $8.1 billion holding company.
The new building brought under one roof multiple services including credit administration, corporate services, compliance, corporate marketing, and mortgage and loan processing.
The new hub has high-speed, fiber-optic connections to United Community Banks’ main data center. The bank owns the fiber network, but Blue Ridge Mountain Electrical Membership Corp. ran the line to tie the new facility to United Community Bank’s existing network, says Jim Stewart, UCB chief technology officer.
Building from scratch made more financial sense than paying rent at scattered places around Blairsville, he says. “We are operating at 60 to 70 percent capacity, so there is room for growth.”
Story by Pamela Coyle
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