Virginia banks saw big mergers and acquisitions in 2025

In Virginia, 2025 was the year of mergers and acquisitions for community banks.

Henrico County’s Atlantic Union Bankshares made the game-changing $1.3 billion purchase of Sandy Spring Bank, which added more than 50 branches in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia to Atlantic Union’s fold, turning it into the largest lower mid-Atlantic regional franchise.

Suffolk-based TowneBank also grew, buying Village Bank, Old Point National Bank and Dogwood State Bank, firming up its presence in Central Virginia and Hampton Roads, as well as expanding into North Carolina and South Carolina.

Of course, the biggest bank merger anywhere in 2025, not just Virginia, was the blockbuster $35.3 billion Capital One-Discover deal in May 2025, with the credit card giants combining to create the sixth largest U.S. bank.

Some of this M&A activity is due to banks’ stock prices rising and a less stringent regulatory environment under the Trump administration, TowneBank’s executive chairman, Bob Aston, said late last year.

According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, there were 181 bank mergers announced last year nationwide, and more than 100 announced in the second half of the year, compared to about 60 in the second half of 2024. We may see fewer mergers announced within Virginia this year, however, because Towne and Atlantic Union leaders have said they are going to take this time to grow organically and don’t plan to purchase other banks in the short term.

Still, there could be other mergers or sales of smaller community banks in Virginia in 2026. For example, Alexandria’s Burke & Herbert Financial Services announced in late 2025 it would be purchasing Pennsylvania’s Linkbank for about $354.2 million, creating a bank with $11 billion in total assets.

While acquisitions can bring more regulatory scrutiny of banks, along with higher fees, independent community banks are feeling greater pressure to either grow or be absorbed into other banks. Formed in 1902, Atlantic Union was an $8 billion asset bank in 2016 when CEO John Asbury came aboard. The bank’s board wanted to find a leader who could move it into a new regulatory tier, passing the $10 billion asset mark.

Asbury, who had worked for Bank of America and led a small Santa Fe, New Mexico, bank, laid it out for the board: “If we want to be independent and we want to cross $10 billion, this will be a $13 [billion] or $15 billion asset bank — or it’ll simply be gone because it was too expensive.”

Today, Atlantic Union is a $38.7 billion bank, and TowneBank, formed in 1999 in Aston’s garage, now exceeds $20 billion.

Although the tax structure of federal credit unions differs from that of community banks — and remains a bone of contention among bankers who argue that credit unions increasingly act like banks but don’t have to pay as many taxes — mergers among credit unions have also increased in recent years. Arlington Community and CommonWealth One announced their merger in September 2025, and in January 2025, Northern Virginia’s Apple Federal acquired NextMark credit union, creating a $5 billion institution.

TowneBank’s Aston, who has more than 50 years of experience in banking, said he expects to see a lot more mergers announced among banks in the next year. For now, he noted, “if you can reach a deal with a potential seller, you can get the deal approved.”