Georgia S. Derrico and the second opening day

Georgia S. Derrico had already done the part that usually brings a banking story to its conclusion. She had founded a bank, run it for eighteen years, and agreed to sell it in a transaction announced at $330 million. Southern Financial Bancorp went to Provident Bankshares in April 2004. There was a perfectly serviceable ending available: the founder leaves, the buyer changes the signs, everybody gets on with something else.

Instead, Derrico helped organize another bank. The new holding company took shape in July 2004; Sonabank opened for business on April 14, 2005. The interval between finishing one institution and preparing the next could be measured in months. Whatever retirement offered, it apparently had competition.

The second venture would eventually acquire a different name: Primis. Derrico’s connection to that bank begins well before the rebranding, with the practical work of creating Sonabank alongside her husband and business partner, R. Roderick Porter. She was its founding chairman and chief executive. To understand her place in its history, start with the repetition. She had learned how much work a new bank required, then signed up again.

A banker before she was a founder

Derrico’s preparation began far from a Virginia branch counter. She studied international affairs at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and pursued graduate study at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. At Johns Hopkins’ Bologna Center, she belonged to the class of 1969. Italy would remain part of her life long after her student days.

She joined Chemical Bank in 1970. Her later responsibilities there included serving as senior vice president and chief administrative and credit officer of its Multinational Division. She also headed the Mid-Atlantic district within the Corporate Banking Division. These were jobs inside a large institution, involving both lending judgment and the machinery that makes a bank function.

That combination matters. A founder who has spent time evaluating credit knows that opening a bank involves more than attracting deposits and putting a reassuring surname on the door. Money lent out has to come back. Growth creates additional decisions, additional people, and additional opportunities to make an expensive mistake.

Porter came from Chemical too. Their professional lives overlapped with their personal ones: they married in 1982 and bought Marblehead Farm in The Plains, Virginia. He later worked at Morgan Stanley and became a founding director of Southern Financial. When he joined the bank full time in 1998 as president and chief operating officer, Derrico remained chief executive. The partnership had distinct jobs attached.

The first bank had to earn its size

Southern Financial began in Herndon in 1986, with a little over $4 million in startup capital. Its first premises were in a strip mall near a Kmart. It is a useful detail to keep alongside the eventual sale price. The beginning belonged to the world of available premises and limited resources, rather than the polished language of a merger announcement.

The bank went public in 1993 and became a state-chartered commercial bank in 1995. Over time, acquisitions added offices and customers. Its early mortgage business gave way to a greater emphasis on commercial lending. The institution changed as it grew; Derrico’s first project required years of operating decisions before it became something another bank wanted to buy.

By the time of the 2004 sale, Southern Financial had $1.5 billion in assets and 34 banking offices. Those assets were the institution’s balance sheet, not its founder’s personal fortune. The distinction is easy to lose when a career is compressed into a large number. It also obscures the more interesting accomplishment: an organization with employees, borrowers, systems, and a regional presence had been assembled from a small beginning.

The announced merger terms combined Provident shares with cash for Southern Financial shareholders. Derrico described the deal in terms of opportunities for customers and employees. Selling a bank transfers the institution into a new organization, along with the consequences for people who never attended the negotiations. A founder’s final transaction is also somebody else’s next working day.

Starting again, with familiar colleagues

The new venture carried experience across from the old one. In its 2006 offering documents, Southern National Bancorp said every member of its senior management team had previously worked with Derrico and Porter at Southern Financial. A newly opened bank could therefore have a management team with a shared working history. The charter was new; many of the professional relationships were already established.

Sonabank’s early numbers show how quickly the work accumulated. Between June 30, 2005 and June 30, 2006, assets rose from $45.3 million to $145.6 million. Deposits went from $8.1 million to $104.4 million. The bank acquired a Clifton Forge branch in December 2005 and arranged to buy 1st Service Bank the following year.

The same documents contain a quieter number. Sonabank lost money over its first operating year, but recorded a profitable fourth quarter in 2005. That detail puts the growth figures in perspective. A larger balance sheet and a profitable business are related ambitions, with separate arithmetic. Even on the second attempt, a founder still has to manage the opening costs.

Derrico’s language about hiring was similarly practical. Announcing a chief credit officer in 2010, she emphasized the need for more depth in the management team as Sonabank expanded. The appointment also moved the existing credit chief into a risk role. Expansion called for a thicker layer of expertise around lending, with responsibility assigned to particular people.

“it is critical that we broaden and deepen our team.”

Georgia S. Derrico, 2010

A merger changes the job

Southern National’s combination with Eastern Virginia Bankshares took years to arrive. Derrico, Porter, and Eastern Virginia chief executive Joe Shearin discussed a possible transaction in late 2011 and early 2012, then set the discussions aside. They continued to meet through industry and business connections. The eventual agreement followed an extended acquaintance rather than a sudden introduction.

When the merger closed on June 23, 2017, the combined company had approximately $2.6 billion in assets. Shearin became chief executive; Derrico became executive chairman, and Porter executive vice chairman. The change redistributed authority in the business she had helped establish. Founding an institution and running it indefinitely are separate propositions, even when the founder remains at the table.

Derrico retired from the executive chairmanship in March 2020. A year later, on March 31, 2021, Southern National became Primis Financial Corp. and Sonabank became Primis Bank. The sequence matters to her biography: the Primis name belongs to the institution’s later chapter. Her operating career there belongs to its Sonabank years.

Another use for a banking education

There is a second institutional thread in Derrico’s life, involving students. She and Porter established the Dr. George M. Santangelo Fellowship at the Bologna Center in 2004, supporting students of Italian-American descent. They also helped fund the center’s building campaign, naming its finance and administration office in memory of her father. For a banking family, the choice of room had a certain occupational consistency.

“He was an ardent believer in education,” Derrico said of her father. He had supported her attendance at Bologna. Her gift returned to the place where she had studied and attached his name to an opportunity for others. The connection was specific: a father’s encouragement, a daughter’s education, and a fellowship for later students.

In 2019, Derrico and Porter helped arrange a four-year scholarship for Miguel Benitez, a San Miguel Academy graduate, to attend Blue Ridge School in Virginia. They had met the academy’s Father Mark Connell at a scholarship event and visited the school afterward. The award honored their friends Tom and Suzie Baker; Tom had been Sonabank’s chief credit officer.

Marblehead Farm became part of this educational work too. San Miguel students visited the property, and the couple created accommodation for young guests. A 2023 gathering brought Santangelo Scholars to the farm for an event supporting the gap between scholarships and boarding-school tuition. The place associated with horses also became a meeting place for students and the people financing their education.

The next chapter fits in a book

The connection has continued beyond Derrico’s executive retirement. At the scholarship fund’s December 2025 event, she presented $7,500 to the Hill School for a student’s further private-school education. The fund identified her as its treasurer in its February 2026 account of the evening. The scale is smaller than a bank merger, and the intended recipient much easier to picture.

September 2025 also brought For Love and Money, the 208-page memoir credited to Derrico and Porter. Its subtitle names love, ambition, perseverance, and the founding of Southern Financial Bank. The book uses their two perspectives to revisit a business they built together. Porter died in June 2024; the published volume carries both their names.

Derrico’s career can be followed through the changing names on bank documents. Southern Financial. Southern National. Sonabank. Primis. Her other commitments offer another route through the same years: Bologna, Marblehead Farm, a fellowship, a school visit, a scholarship check. Between them is a life spent making decisions about where money should go, and what might become possible when it gets there.