Carter Bankshares, Inc.

Carter Bankshares, Inc.

Carter Bankshares was founded in 1974 as a single-bank holding company to support Martinsville's textile and furniture manufacturing base. The Van Dyke family's involvement deepened over decades, with Litz Van Dyke now serving as CEO and Phillip Wilson as president of the subsidiary bank. The enterprise grew primarily through de novo branch expansion rather than acquisition, building one of the largest deposit franchises in southern Virginia. Strategy runs almost entirely through the subsidiary bank's loan book. The portfolio is heavily weighted toward commercial real estate — including retail, office, and multifamily properties concentrated in Virginia and North Carolina — with additional exposure to C&I loans, construction lending, and residential mortgages. Unlike holding companies that manage external limited-partner capital, Carter's deployment mirrors the bank's balance-sheet lending. This makes it a concentrated play on Piedmont-region property markets and the creditworthiness of small to midsize businesses operating along the Interstate 81 corridor. The company traces its lineage to a time when Martinsville was a hub for homegrown manufacturing; today it fields roughly 65 branches across Virginia and North Carolina. In May 2023, the firm completed the sale of substantially all of its insurance subsidiary's operations to HUB International, refocusing entirely on banking and commercial lending (per public filings, 2023). The bank's parent entity does not manage a separate asset management arm or a philanthropic foundation of significant scale, and it eschews the venture-capital or club-deal structures found at private family offices. What separates Carter Bankshares structurally from a generic family office is its deliberate choice to retain a community-bank charter and public-company reporting obligations as the primary vehicle for wealth stewardship. The Van Dyke family's concentrated share ownership — crossing the 5% filing threshold — gives them outsized influence over a multi-billion-dollar deposit franchise without the opaqueness of a traditional private trust structure. This architecture ties the family's long-term economic interest directly to enduring, yield-focused commercial banking rather than to the fee-based asset management model that defines most family-run financial enterprises of similar scale.