By Stephen Smoot
“It’s been a great experience . . . It’s been an honor and privilege to serve these communities,” stated Bill Loving
Pendleton Community Bank for the first time in many years will have another captain handling the wheel as Loving, long-time president and a nationally respected voice on behalf of community banking, steps down from his role.
While Loving will step aside from his role, he will remain in advisory and other roles, contributing from his experience as the bank moves forward.
“I started my banking career through my mother,” explained Loving. She served as “vice president and cashier of a new bank in Beckley that had just opened. They were in a trailer.”
He added that “I came home from school one day and she asked me if I wanted a job at a bank. Well you know what my first thought was, yeah I want to work at a bank!”
“She says good. We need a janitor,” Loving remembered and laughed. “I started part time when I was in junior high school as janitor of this new bank in Beckley.”
That bank, Cardinal State Bank, was established in January of 1972. Through the years a series of mergers led to its incorporation into United Bank.
He added “I’d been around banking my entire life because that’s what my mother was” but that he had also not given a lot of thought to “seeing what community banks do.”
Even as Loving swept the floors and emptied waste baskets, he caught the eye of people who could help him along. “I didn’t know what the president of the bank was doing then, but he was mentoring me,” he said. The example set by the bank president and also his mother pulled him farther into the field and “I just decided at that point this is the career I want to follow.”
That bank president, Alex George, served as a longtime leader in the Raleigh County community. He led the Beckley Area Foundation and a scholarship foundation, served as vice president of the area chamber of commerce, and remained active in a number of community organizations.
Early on as Loving worked his way through school and his early career, he had a tremendous opportunity to learn the business. He explained that the doctrine of specialization had not yet taken hold and as a result “I had the opportunity to work through virtually every department of the bank.”
And during the past 54 years, Loving shared, “I tell people, we may do it a different way, but I still know what the end result looks like.” Those decades saw banking go from money moving primarily by check and cash to primarily online. Automatic Teller Machines revolutionized banking decades ago. Now Interactive Teller Machines offer an entirely new frontier in customer service at financial institutions.
“Now you can interactively work with a live person conducting your banking transactions,” he commented.
For 14 years, Loving worked at the small Southern West Virginia bank, saying, “And that’s where I learned the importance of community banking and helping people.”
At the turn of the millennium William McCoy, Jr., chairman of the Pendleton County Bank board, opened a search for a new bank president upon the retirement of Richard Homan. Loving had worked his way into a position at then Charleston based One Valley Bank. As BB&T, now Truist, absorbed One Valley Bank, Loving had a job offer with the new company. He said “but yet, I wasn’t sure that was the banking model that I felt comfortable with.”
BB&T built a sound reputation as a larger bank with a strongly conservative approach to its finances, but community banking remained Loving’s preferred area of the industry.
Loving worked with one of McCoy’s nieces, who had informed her uncle about her colleague. McCoy reached out to Loving, who responded with “I’m not sure.” Then the bank deployed Carole Hartman to try and convince the Raleigh County banker to move east.
“My wife and I came up and we said, well, let’s see what happens,” said Loving. “And the rest, as they say, was history.”
He shared that he “jokingly tells people that I was called the big city banker from Beckley. I also tell people I’ve been adopted. I feel adopted by the community.”
Pendleton County Bank became Pendleton Community Bank as the business expanded, putting branches in Moorefield, then elsewhere in the region. Loving came to PCB a year later. Now the company controls $840 million in assets with 16 offices while also earning accolades from West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner for more than a century in business.
As PCB strategically grew into areas of opportunity and growth, Loving emerged as a spokesman for community banking. These banks operate under different regulations than larger banks with national reach. Community banks keep their attention on the areas they directly serve with their financial products, loans, and other services.
As Loving puts it, a community bank will not take a deposit from one city to use to issue a loan in another place a thousand miles away.
He represented community banking in forums as different as international banking conferences and the United States Senate. Loving continually worked to enhance understanding of their special roles and also why communities rely on them to thrive.
Loving remembered when appointed chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America…“that year I went in to give my speech at the convention and the bank president who served as his earliest mentor, as well as his wife joined me at the convention and he was in the audience when I talked about him and his mentorship.”
To remind Loving of where he had been, “he gave me that picture” of the original Cardinal State Bank “that sat on his desk for years.” That, of course reinforces what Loving has repeated about community banking and also what he has envisioned for PCB.
A bank may run on money, but it cannot do business to its full potential if it forgets its relationships with people.
“It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve the communities and to work with the many talented people I have over the years,” Loving concluded.
