After $8.6B merger, Atlanta banking firm to accelerate hiring in 2026
Fresh off a $8.6 billion merger, what’s become one of the country’s largest regional banks says it will ramp up hiring as it looks to take market share across the Southeast.
Pinnacle Financial Partners, the Nashville bank that combined with Columbus-based Synovus Financial early this month, plans to hire up to 250 bankers this year — a jump from 2025 when the two banks combined hired 217.
Hiring is expected to accelerate into next year, with the goal of adding up to 275 bankers in 2027, Kevin Blair, the former Synovus CEO who is now the chief executive of the merged bank, said Thursday on an earnings call.
“We’ll hire across the nine-state footprint,” Blair said on the call, with a strategy focused on recruiting talent from other banks.
“We’re not hiring headhunters,” Blair said. “We’re not taking applications on LinkedIn. It’s identifying who the best bankers are in each market and continuing to call on those bankers and really emboldening ourselves and showing why this is the best platform for them.”
It’s not clear yet how many jobs could come to Atlanta or Columbus — where Synovus was founded more than a century ago and today is one of the city’s largest private employers with about 1,200 workers. Executives have said the merged bank will not ignore its hometown.
A Synovus spokesperson said they could not break down new jobs by geographies.
The banks will consolidate their systems this year, a process expected to be complete in March 2027. The headquarters of the combined bank will be in Nashville, while a holding company will have a home base in Atlanta.
The holding company operates more than 400 locations across nine states, employing more than 8,000 workers.
The hiring efforts come despite a shaky economy. For example, many companies have dealt with rising costs because of new tariff policies, which “still play a risk factor for our clients,” Blair said.
The labor market cooled last year in response to the uncertainty.
Georgia added 16,300 jobs over the 12 months to November 2025, the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That could lend 2025 to be the worst year for hiring in Georgia since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, per the available data — a trend echoed nationwide.
“Unlike other banks, we’re not waiting for the economy to grow to be able to generate growth,” Blair said. “It will come from being able to hire folks. … The real growth has come from the people that we’ve hired over the last three years and the embedded growth that will come from those individuals [continuing] to build out their book.”
Pinnacle expects its total loans to grow to $91 billion to $93 billion in 2026, up 9% to 11% from the banks’ combined loans at the end of 2025. About 35% of that growth is expected to come from financial advisers hired within the past three years, Blair said.
Pinnacle expects its total deposits to grow to $106.5 billion to $108.5 billion in 2026, or up 8% to 10%, he said.
“Pinnacle’s proven revenue producer hiring model allows our balance sheet growth to be more resilient and sustainable regardless of economic growth, interest rate levels and the like,” Blair said.
Staff writer Zachary Hansen contributed to this report.
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