Burney Warren, the executive who has run BB&T Corp.'s bank acquisition strategy like a business line for more than a decade, will retire at yearend, the company said Tuesday.
Mr. Warren, 59, helped oversee the $128 billion-asset company's evolution from a small rural operation to one of the nation's largest banking companies and was involved in 58 acquisitions.
"We really have changed the face of BB&T," Mr. Warren said in an interview Tuesday. "The single most important thing is that we are better diversified for the future, both in terms of our markets and our business lines."
Richard Fowler, who has largely overseen the company's purchases of businesses such as specialty lenders and asset managers since 2002, is to assume Mr. Warren's role. Mr. Fowler has handled a dozen BB&T deals in the past five years, the company said.
Mr. Warren joined BB&T in 1990 after it bought First Federal Savings of Pitt County, a rural North Carolina bank where he was the president and chief executive officer. At the time BB&T had about $6 billion of assets. By 1995, Mr. Warren was officially overseeing the company's mergers and acquisitions strategy, which included its merger of equals with Southern National Corp. a year later.
BB&T announced his retirement a week after its chairman and chief executive, John A. Allison, said the company is "unlikely" to buy any banks for a year or longer because of deal pricing and credit risk.
Mr. Warren said his retirement is unrelated to the dearth of deal opportunities; he said he had told Mr. Allison more than two years ago of his intent to retire at 60.
Commenting on its strategy during his tenure, he said: "We have always viewed acquisitions as a line of business at BB&T. Our approach has been to identify a business and then try to get to know them better. A number of our transactions - I'd say at least half or more - were negotiated one-on-one with people that we had called on for some time."
Mr. Warren also had a hand in several nonbank deals, such as BB&T's purchase of the brokerage firm Scott & Stringfellow Financial Inc. and the subprime auto lender Regional Acceptance Corp.
The company's aggressive pursuit of bank acquisitions has raised eyebrows on Wall Street at times, particularly after its July 2003 purchase of First Virginia Banks Inc. for $3 billion, and Mr. Warren conceded Tuesday that "not all deals were perfect."
By the end of 2003, Mr. Allison had declared that BB&T would take a two-year break from such deals and asked Mr. Warren to oversee a cost-cutting effort that trimmed $110 million of annual expenses.
Though the company re-emerged as an acquirer in December 2005, when it announced a deal for Main Street Banks Inc. in Atlanta, which closed last year, BB&T did not resume the frantic pace of previous years. It has bought just three banks since then, most recently its May deal for Coastal Financial Corp. in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Mr. Warren said the lull should benefit Mr. Fowler, who is likely to spend "75% of his time on nonbank deals simply because of the environment."
Mr. Fowler, 56, said in an interview Tuesday that over the long term BB&T remains committed to bank acquisitions in the Southeast to boost market share. "We'll continue our dialogue with people" despite market impediments, he said. "We don't do things arbitrarily, and we recognize that deals are nurtured over time. We certainly like the demographics of our footprint and feel there's opportunity there for the future."
