Local Decision-Making Powers SouthState

Over lunch several years ago, David Brooks received some advice about selling his bank from a large bank’s CEO.

“He said, ‘David, because of where you are, the market you’re in, you will have a lot of people who want to buy you,’” Brooks recalls. At the time, Brooks was CEO of Independent Bank Group in McKinney, Texas, which he founded in 1988. “‘Remember, at the end of the day, when you sell your company for stock, all you’ve done is trade stock. You better like that other stock a lot.’”

Brooks took that advice in 2024, when Winter Haven, Florida-based SouthState Bank Corp. announced it would purchase $18 billion Independent for roughly $2 billion. The all-stock deal closed on Jan. 2, 2025, and Brooks now serves on the SouthState board. He doesn’t regret selling his bank. “I wouldn’t trade places with any other regional bank in the country,” he says. “I’m still a large shareholder. I haven’t sold any stock since we merged.”

The acquisition turned out to be a defining moment for SouthState, which eclipsed $67 billion in assets and gained markets in Texas and Colorado. For Bank Director’s RankingBanking study, that put SouthState in a new asset class, where it ranked third among public banks above $50 billion in assets. The annual list ranks banks based on four metrics: return on average total assets, return on average tangible common equity, tangible common equity to tangible assets, and nonperforming assets to loans and other real estate owned. This year’s study uses 2025 results.

SouthState’s success on this year’s list was largely due to its high profitability: With a ROAA of 1.48%, only East West Bancorp in Pasadena, California, rated higher for that metric in the $50 billion-plus tier. SouthState’s capital adequacy was in the top quartile for its category, with an 8.76% tangible common equity ratio.

Much of the 2025 profitability can be attributed to the Independent acquisition. Despite a tepid reaction from the markets, the deal was a financial boon for SouthState due to cost saves, deal accounting, prepayments on the acquired entity’s loans and increased scale, says Stephen Scouten, managing director at Piper Sandler & Co. But even with the accretion from the deal, SouthState had a solid year. “They’ve got a diversified income stream. It’s not just about lending money to certain businesses,” says Christopher Marinac, director of research at Brean Capital. “They’ve got a diverse customer base. They’ve obviously diversified the map.”

The Independent deal offers a glimpse into what works at SouthState, which over the years has expanded into high-growth markets — from its Florida home base into the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and more recently, Texas and Tennessee. “We’re in a spot where the economic activity is greater than that of the nation as a whole,” says SouthState’s president, Richard Murray IV. “We have a better opportunity to grow, better opportunity to participate in that economic activity.” Acquisitions have fueled much of that growth.

A longtime acquirer, SouthState more than doubled in size in 2020 via a merger of equals with CenterState Bank Corp. Today, much of the bank’s executive team, including Murray, CEO and Chair John Corbett and Chief Strategy Officer Stephen Young, has CenterState roots. Those bank leaders point to SouthState’s local leadership model, where decision-making is made close to customers, as the source of its success. And now, they’re pivoting to focus more on organic growth through hiring and building teams to expand and deepen their reach in those valuable markets.

“Local Really Does Matter”
The bank’s 21 division presidents report to Murray, and each of them make decisions for their respective geographies. “They decide how we go to market. They decide how we price loans, how we price deposits, where we’re going to put branches, how many branches we’re going to have, how many people we’re going to have, who are the right people,” says Murray. “Local really does matter.”

The model recognizes that different markets have different dynamics, say bank leaders. That can be particularly beneficial if a bank jumps into a new geography, says Patrick Vernon, an advisory partner at Crowe, a professional services firm. He uses an analogy to another industry where localized decision-making is necessary. “If I had a grocery store chain and I stocked all my stores the exact same, I’m not going to be successful,” he says. “But at a baseline, I’ve got leadership setting the strategy about how we’re going to manage inventory.”

For example, SouthState leans on private banking in Palm Beach, Florida, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country. Further inland in Okeechobee, the focus is on small business and retail. “Both are profitable for very different reasons,” says Young. “Our job at corporate is to provide the platform, and then they deliver.”

Scouten points to the bank’s low-cost deposit base — around 10% to 20% below peers — as a competitive strength that generates favorable margins. The local, relationship-based model has helped SouthState build a deposit base of 1.4 million deposit accounts with an average balance of $40,000, according to a recent investor presentation. “You can go out and buy deposits; you can get big ones and pay a little bit more,” Young says, “but when things happen, they get a little less sticky.”

Retaining Independent’s talent was critical to the success of the acquisition. SouthState moved quickly to ensure that happened, says Brooks. Prior to announcing the deal, Independent’s executive team and top customer-facing leaders signed agreements to stay on, he says. That helped SouthState retain other senior lenders and staff. Eighteen months later, SouthState has lost a few senior lenders but “our recruiting of senior lenders across Texas and Colorado has been very successful, replacing all that we have lost and adding approximately 20 net new leaders,” says Brooks.

Marinac was an early critic of the Independent acquisition due to the expansion outside SouthState’s Southeastern home base. But he gives the bank solid marks so far for the integration. “They have done a nice job of retaining customers and people,” he says. However, “the next year is critical to continue to retain the people and the customers.”

The decentralized model contributed to the success of the integration, says Brooks. Integrated staff feel like they’re still at a smaller company, he explains, despite the significant leap in size. Now, with banks such as Huntington Bancshares and Fifth Third Bancorp buying banks in the Lone Star State, there should be even more opportunity for SouthState. “We have scale in markets that matter,” he says. “Now, as there’s disruption all around us, we’re able to pick and choose the best talent.”

Local Leadership in Action
Cameron Wells, SouthState’s division president for middle Tennessee, also hopes to take advantage of similar disruption in booming Nashville, where the bank opened a loan production office in the trendy Wedgewood/Houston area in April 2025. The group has grown rapidly; Wells moved his staff into a bigger office in June 2026. He expects to grow loans by 10% this year, but he has the freedom to decide where to target that growth. He’s focused on middle market borrowers — a market that Pinnacle Financial Partners, fresh off a merger with Synovus Financial Corp., has traditionally dominated locally. “We’ve become a thorn,” Wells says, “and that’s been fun to build that out.”

When he talked to SouthState executives about joining the bank, he was attracted to the local leadership model. It reminded him of BB&T Corp., which merged with SunTrust Banks in 2019 and became Truist Financial Corp. “We were known for our customer service,” says Wells, who spent 16 years at BB&T and was a market president at Truist. “We were also known as a nice growing bank that took a conservative approach from a credit standpoint, but we could still get our growth because we added a lot of value to our interactions with our clients and prospects.” The SouthState model, he adds, was “what I was desiring to get back into — putting it in the hands of folks who live in that market, who understand that market, who know what’s good for that market and letting them make the decisions on a local level.”

Five of the 10 members of the burgeoning Nashville team came from the old BB&T, says Wells, and two joined Bank of America Corp. and PNC Financial Services Group. “We’re able to go attract that talent from the larger banks,” he says. “They know that it can be done in an easier, simpler way, a more local way.”

Murray, SouthState’s president, and Young, chief strategy officer, credit the bank’s business model and culture with attracting and retaining the talent it needs to grow. “If you’re one of our relationship managers, you have your own book of loans and deposits and expenses, your marketing expenses, how you entertain your clients and the profit that you produce as a relationship manager,” says Murray. “You’re really running your own business, and that’s an attractive environment for many bankers.”

As division president, Wells spent several weeks on the road visiting other markets after he was hired; he was learning along with four division heads that joined with the Independent acquisition.

SouthState takes cultural integration seriously. According to Young, the bank’s Florida division leader moved to Dallas with his wife for 18 months to answer questions and clear up misunderstandings with acquired Independent staff; he was later joined by presidents and relationship managers from other markets. “Their whole job was to do nothing but to go to dinners, to get to know each other,” Young says. During the conversion, upwards of 300 frontline salespeople left the Southeast to spend two or three weeks in the new markets.

Wells says his team has been “blown away” by the onboarding process. He recently sent two new hires — a middle market banker and a private banker — to an orientation in Houston tailored for revenue producers. The private banker also visited her counterparts in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, and she noticed differences in how each office ran. “That’s the beauty of the SouthState model,” says Wells. “They allow division presidents to build models within their division that best fit the talents of their team and the needs of their market.”

Sustaining the Model
The Southeastern U.S. has grown increasingly competitive as more banks expand into the region through branching and M&A. “There’s going to be a lot of disruption,” says Murray. “As we were planning strategically for 2026, we said, ‘We’re going to try to grow organically. We’re not interested in doing another M&A deal anytime soon.’”

Despite the more than 70 mergers that built present-day SouthState, dealmaking could be in the rearview mirror. And closing in on $69 billion in assets, fewer targets make sense for SouthState these days. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to go buy a sub-$5 billion bank when we can grow a $5 billion bank in the next nine months,” notes Brooks, the former Independent CEO and current SouthState director. More regional banks have signaled an emphasis on organic growth, says Scouten, because investors aren’t rewarding M&A. “Those stocks have not traded well, SouthState included,” he says, “even though it’s hard to argue that the [Independent] deal wasn’t just a home run.”

Despite its successes, SouthState does face some challenges. For one, Marinac believes the bank could further decrease its cost of funds and bring expenses down. And its correspondent banking and capital markets division, a national business line, has been a drag on earnings due to the higher interest rate environment, he adds.

Given SouthState’s rapid growth, some analysts question whether bank leaders can keep the local leadership model going. But bank leaders disagree. “We think the model is scalable,” says Murray.

Wells, the middle Tennessee division president, believes SouthState can sustain its model as long as Corbett and his team are running the bank. “He talks about it every meeting I’m in with him — how do we push more things down to the local level.”

Corbett, at 57, could be running SouthState for years to come. When Brooks and Corbett first talked about combining their two banks, “It was always understood between John and I that he was the young guy with the long pathway ahead, and that anything we did together would involve me becoming a board-level participant,” says Brooks. “You have to have strong leadership. We’ve got a strong balance sheet, tons of capital, and we’re generating capital faster than we can deploy it. … We’re very well positioned for whatever comes.”

Scouten believes SouthState has the strongest management team under his coverage due to its consistency and success. “They’re a very conservative, diligent management team. I don’t think they want to ever get too far in any direction, don’t want to grow too fast, don’t want to be too active on the M&A front,” he says. “They’re very intentional about balance, and they’re very intentional about their culture.”

Shantella Cooper, another SouthState board member, describes a leadership team that emphasizes long-term strategy over trends. “[They are] clear about who we are and who we’re not, where we’re going to play and where we’re not going to play,” she says. “John does his homework.”

That doesn’t mean SouthState ignores emerging technologies. Like a growing number of regional banks, it has a formal program to deploy artificial intelligence across the organization. “It’s all toward a bigger vision of how we’re creating the scale,” says Brooks. “I think we’re in as good a position as any regional bank in the country to continue to grow and continue to be a player on a national basis.”

Over the past 15 years, SouthState has built one of the best footprints in the country, says Young, and now $124 billion in deposits could be unlocked in those markets through M&A disruption. “Don’t know how we’ll do that,” he says. “We just know that’s a fact, and we know that’s an opportunity.”