Roanoke businessman Ab Boxley compares the city’s place in a newly announced big-bank expansion strategy to the site of the 1944 Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe.
Roanoke is like Normandy to the Bank of North Carolina, a High Point institution that bought Valley Bank in 2015 to establish a Virginia beachhead.
In recent weeks, the North Carolina bank merged into Pinnacle Bank out of Nashville, Tennessee. Pinnacle then charted what it hopes will be an advance into major urban markets in the state. In other words, Roanoke was just a start.
“We didn’t put troops in Normandy and hope they sat on the beach, right? We put troops in Normandy so they could get to the rest of Europe,” said Boxley, a Pinnacle board member and CEO of Boxley Materials Co.
