Mr. Shearin: First, Eastern Virginia Bankshares is a one-bank holding company to its banking subsidiary, EVB. The bank was founded in 1910, when two of our original banks, Bank of Northumberland and Southside Bank, formed community banks in the little communities of Northumberland County, town of Heathsville, and Essex County, town of Tappahannock, respectively, all within about 30 to 60 days of each other and operated independently until 1997, when the boards of directors got together and consolidated the two banks under a holding company, Eastern Virginia Bankshares. The business plan behind this initiative called into play economies of scale, thereby making the company more profitable, an opportunity to be publicly traded on Nasdaq, which provided increased stockholder awareness among existing and potential shareholders, and the potential to trade more fluidly and promote shareholder value. From the formation of the holding company in 1997 until 2000, the two banks operated totally independently, and essentially not taking advantage of economies of scale and consolidation of functional corporate activities afforded through a holding company effort. Later the holding company opened a de novo bank east around Richmond, in Hanover County, and named the bank after its county namesake, Hanover Bank. At this point, the three banks continued to operate independently of each other until 2001.
When I came on board, my main focus was to bring these banks together operationally, consolidating backroom functions because our banks were too independent of each other. We were working autonomously and extremely inefficiently. We had a lot of duplicate overhead because we had three separate functions, officers and policies in many areas, such as the HR department, three CFOs in treasury management services, different credit policies, different credit administration and loan operations. It was critical that we gain efficiencies out of our combined company. So we started consolidating all the backroom functions in 2002 and 2003, and then in 2004 and 2005 decided that we needed to look at combining the three companies. And so in April of 2006, we successfully consolidated all three banks together under one brand, collapsed two of the charters into one and became EVB. We now operate 25 conveniently located branch operations throughout the Eastern Virginia and metropolitan regions of Richmond.
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