Park Sterling Corp., the holding company for Park Sterling Bank, is continuing to pursue its goal as a regional bank. The company announced this week the signing of a definitive merger agreement to acquire Provident Community Bancshares, the holding company for Rock Hill, S.C.-based Provident Community Bank. Total transaction value is about $6.5 million, according to a news release from both companies.
 
Provident Community Bank has nine locations in upstate South Carolina. When it merges with Charlotte-based Park Sterling, the combined company will have about $2.3 billion in total assets, $1.9 billion in total deposits, $1.4 billion in total loans and a network of 54 offices in the Carolinas, Virginia and north Georgia, the release stated.
 
“The merger will strengthen Park Sterling’s position as the largest community bank in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia MSA, which includes Rock Hill, Provident Community’s home market, according to the most recently available deposit market share data,” the release stated.
 
Park Sterling has one office in the Wilmington market and about $38 million in deposits in the market, according to FDIC information current as of July 1.
 
“The reason we have an office in Wilmington is that significant capital for Park Sterling came out of Wilmington,” David Parker, Park Sterling’s eastern North Carolina regional president, said in an interview Friday. “When Brian Kennedy started the bank in 2006, there was a capital raise in this area.”
 
Parker said the merger with Provident gives Park Sterling a stronger presence in its core area of the Charlotte-Gastonia-upstate South Carolina and “builds us out in a market in which we’ve got a fair amount of heft today.”
 
“From a local perspective, it is an indication of our desire to grow toward our objective of building a regional bank through North and South Carolina, Richmond and tidewater Virginia,” Parker said, adding that the bank recently entered the Virginia market by opening an office in Richmond and staffing it with a commercial banking, mortgage and wealth management team that Park Sterling hired from StellarOne Bank when the latter was acquired by Union First Market Bancshares.  
 
Park Sterling will pay $1.4 million to Provident’s shareholders and $5.1 million to the U.S. Treasury to purchase Provident’s Series A Preferred Stock shares still owned by taxpayers as part of Provident’s bailout through the 2009 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), according to the news release.
 
The purchase price for the Series A preferred stock represents a 45 percent discount from its face value of $1,000 per share, the release stated.
 
The merger agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of each company, according to the release. Closing of the transaction, which is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2014, is subject to customary conditions, including approval by Provident Community's common stockholders, completion of the purchase of the Series A preferred stock from the Department of Treasury and receipt of regulatory approval.