Centura tries to hoist its sales.

• Author: Overton, Sharon
• Position: Centura Banks Inc.

The $4.1 billion bank steers clear from its past as a staid financial institution to a future as a one-stop money mart.

By banking standards, Bob Mauldin is considered something of a free spirit. The 59-year-old chairman and CEO of Centura Banks cruises around Rocky Mount in a shiny, black Chrysler LeBaron convertible. After work, he and his wife make 20-mile bike treks. Recently, he took classes with members of the secretarial pool to learn how to use his new notebook computer.

This year, when the creative types at Price/McNabb brought him an idea for a TV ad featuring a 6-foot mechanical dollar that eats potato chips and lounges around in a swimming pool, Mauldin hesitated. Wait a minute, he thought. This isn't what a bank ad is supposed to look like. Most feature babies or parades or, as one member of the creative team put it, "dull, boring people having meaningful interactions with bank employees." This ad, with its moving furniture and floating people, was like a cross between Pee Wee's Playhouse and Twin Peaks.

Then Mauldin's daughter, a 30-year-old graduate student at East Carolina University, saw it. Cool, she said. Which is precisely what Mauldin wanted to hear.

The ad campaign is part of Centura's effort to project an image that is young, hip and appealing to late baby boomers, many of whom view banks as depositories for their checking and savings accounts. "It signals the fact that we are willing to do business in a different way," Mauldin says, "that the bank is changing, that we aren't necessarily a bunch of stuffy old bankers, even though we look like them."

In the last nine months, Centura, a $4.1 billion bank with deep roots in Eastern North Carolina, has been undergoing a transformation aimed at carving a niche in the crowded financial-services field and at picking up market share in the state's major cities. The bank has dispensed with management charts, redesigned branches, hired consultants and encouraged employees to rethink the way they do business.

Centura executives claim that what they're doing amounts to nothing less than "reinventing banking." Others don't go quite that far. Most banks are trying to loosen up their staid images and find new ways to reach customers, says Bonnie Marano, advertising manager for Southern National Corp., which recently announced it will merge with BB&T Financial Corp. "You can't change a culture overnight."

Still, Centura seems determined to distance itself from the pack. And its aggressive stance hasn't gone unnoticed. In addition to its eye-catching ad campaign, Centura has launched a full-service stock brokerage, invested millions in a state-of-the-art branch-automation system, expanded its telephone-banking operation and announced plans in July to put automatic teller machines in 95 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. While most banks talk about developing a more sales-oriented culture, "Centura clearly seems to be investing in the technology and the people, and even altering the way that some people are compensated, in an effort to get there," points out David Stumpf, a banking analyst with Wheat First Butcher Singer in Richmond, Va. "What Centura is attempting to do is pretty aggressively reposition the bank in the eyes of both the customer and the investor."

It's something all banks will have to do to survive. "In the end, Centura doesn't become something that other banks aren't in the next quarter or two," adds analyst John A. Heffern of Alex. Brown & Sons in Baltimore. "This isn't rocket science. Other banks are onto the same things. The only difference is who will be more focused."

Rocky Mount, which straddles the Edgecombe and Nash county line in the heart of Tar Heel tobacco country, isn't exactly a hotbed of radical...