Business

UCB ranked 14th in banking performance

By Bill Moss, Published: January 23, 2015

United Community Bank was recently recognized as one of America's best performing banks by Forbes magazine.

"America's Best and Worst Banks," the business magazine's sixth annual measure of publicly traded banks and thrifts, ranked 100 of the largest publicly traded banks and thrifts nationwide. United ranked 14th on the 2015 list. Based in Blairsville, Ga., United Community Banks Inc. is a registered bank holding company with $7.5 billion in assets. It has 100 offices in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, including its Hendersonville branch at 2520 Chimney Rock Road, which is led by City President Fair Nabers Waggoner.

“We’ve been working incredibly hard and as a bank it all seems to be coming together,” she said. “We’ve got a really good focus to show that a community bank can hang in there with the big guys while being a solid organization.”

Fair Waggoner speaks at N.C. Apple Festival opening in 2013.Adding a top mortgage producer, Carolyn Swanner, “has made a difference,” she said, while the local branch has accumulated “a good mix” of personal, home mortgage and commercial banking. It’s had a strong run of commercial loans over the past 12 months.

“I feel like we have been for years laying the right groundwork and it seems like it’s all coming to fruition,” Waggoner said. “We rely almost solely on advocacy and word of mouth and being out and being part of the community and I think people are starting to value a community bank even more. Everyone talks about customer service but we are actually ‘mystery-shopped’ to very strict criteria by a third party. It’s something across the board with our company that we take seriously.” Its slogan is "the bank that SERVICE built."

Former Wachovia executive John Goins started the Hendersonville office nine years ago. Waggoner has been with the bank for five years.

The Forbes report ranked the publicly traded banks on nine measures of financial health including return on average equity, net interest margin, nonperforming loans (NPLs) as a percentage of loans, nonperforming assets as percentage of assets, reserves as a percentage of NPLs, two capital ratios (Tier 1 and risk-based), leverage ratio and one-year sales growth.
"Banking is a 'people business' and United is fortunate to have dedicated, results-oriented employees with a true passion to serve its customers with our golden rule of banking: serving our customers the way we would want to be treated," said Jimmy Tallent, Chief Executive Officer of the Bank. "At the end of the day, that drives the financial results of our company. I'm very proud of our United Team."