Seacoast Bank cements local presence with opening of First Coast HQ

Seacoast Bank cements local presence with opening of First Coast HQ (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Well-capitalized regional banks will weather the recent turmoil in the sector, Seacoast Bank CEO Charles Shaffer said Tuesday, even if the economy enters a recession.

That puts Seacoast — one of the fastest-growing banks in the state due to a slew of acquisitions last year — in a strong position, the CEO said moments after cutting the ribbon on the bank’s newest facility.

Shaffer was in Jacksonville as Seacoast Banking Corp. of Florida opened its Jacksonville headquarters, cementing its local involvement about a year after launching in the area.

With a commercial lending staff of about 10 and a branch office with four employees, the location marks the northward boundary of Seacoast’s current footprint.

The team had been working out of temporary space until opening the local headquarters on Gate Parkway

“We now span most of the state of Florida,” Shaffer said, “and we just started working north. Jacksonville has a lot going on and is expanding and growing, and it just made sense for us to come here.”

Seacoast began ramping up that expansion in March 2022, bringing on a number of executives with deep roots in Jacksonville’s banking sector, including hiring Dawn Dorsey to head up First Coast operations.

She was one of several executives with experience at SunTrust and BB&T — two banks that merged to become Truist in 2019 — who joined Seacoast in early 2022, including Jennifer Gardell, John Brigman, Brittany Turner and Michelle Oleszek.

Jim Citrano, former senior vice president at Truist, joined Seacoast as senior vice president for commercial real estate in 2021.

“It’s been great to be the leaders of an organization here locally helping to bring one of the largest community banks headquartered in the state of Florida to Northeast Florida,” Dorsey said Tuesday. 

Seacoast has some historic ties to Jacksonville, with the bank’s founder, Dennis S. Hudson Sr., getting his first job in the industry at the Banker’s Financing Co. in Jacksonville in 1915.

In 1926, Hudson received the charter to open what is now Seacoast Bank, which is headquartered in Stuart.

The past few years have been a time of growth for the bank, which leapt from $9.68 billion in assets in 2021 to more than $15 billion in assets in 2022 with the acquisition of three Florida banks: Coral Gables, Fla.-based Professional Holding Corp., Fla.-based Drummond Banking Co. and Miami-based Apollo Bancshares Inc.

“We’ve been around 100 years,” Shaffer said, “and we know it’s important to carry strong capital and build a diversified book of business and realize the banks are made up of people. If you have really good bankers that really work well together and do the right things for their clients consistently, it takes care of itself.”

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