NCNB faces the nation.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: Executive team of NCNB Corp.'s acquisition of C and S/Sovran Corp. pulls the biggest merger in the United States and the bank is now known as NationsBank; includes related article - Cover Story

As 1991 drew to a close, lofty ambition ran so rampant around NCNB Corp. that some suggested the bank should have skipped a step and renamed itself WorldsBank. Consider some of the boasts bouncing down the corridors of its Charlotte Corporate headquarters:

Rusty Rainey, the merger coordinator overseeing the $4.3 billion acquisition of C&S/Sovran Corp.: "NCNB's goal is to be one of the world's top companies, not just one of its top banks."

Frank Gentry, director of corporate strategy and planning: "When I hear a banker talk about problems of digestion after an acquisition, I wonder what that person has been eating."

Rusty Page, who leads investor relations: "We're as good as anybody can be in growing soundly while also providing great shareholder return."

Big talk, but in a year when much of the economic news was downright depressing, NCNB backed it up by pulling off its biggest dealer ever. The bold words were the language of a corporate culture that, over three decades, turned two commercial banks in Greensboro and Charlotte into a regional behemoth poised to become the nation's biggest bank by the turn of the century.

Putting its money where its mouth is, NCNB took on a name many think it just might live up to. "NationsBank may be the most important banking company in the country because of its size and how it was created," says John Poelker, an Atlanta consultant who was president of C&S Corp. from 1979 to 1986. "If you look around the nation for a management team you'd want running a bank this size, NCNB is in the top three groups of who would have a chance of pulling it off."

The key word here is team. Nobody doubts who calls the shots at NCNB. In eight years as chairman and CEO, Hugh McColl Jr. has earned a reputation as Dixie's rendition of William Tecumseh Sherman, cutting a swath through the Southland while making himself and his personality synonymous with the bank he leads. "Talk to anybody at NCNB and you don't have to ask who's on first," says Henry Coffey, an analyst at J.C. Bradford in Nashville. "There is one way of doing things."

But even Lee relied on his lieutenants and, without them, lost the region McColl has won. To pull off its dramatic expansions, NCNB has counted on a handful of senior executives who have spent most of their careers making the deals work. Though not well known outside NCNB, they have played key roles in the bank's expansion and - just as important - in sidestepping pitfalls that have tripped up competitors' mergers. All have earned McColl's respect while recognizing the limits of their power.

It is these men, who turned big talk into the nation's fourth-largest bank, who are BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's Movers and Shakers of the Year.

Out front you'll find Frank Gentry, who for years has scouted attractive acquisitions through public documents, analysts' reports and informal networking. "The company is very different now that when I joined it in 1973," he says, "but what's been consistent throughout is that NCNB has always taken the position that the industry had to change, it had to become more competitive."

Trained in strategic planning at Carnegie-Mellon University, Gentry, 49, was working in Exxon's regional office in Charlotte when NCNB recruited him. "They wanted someone with prior planning experience, but they didn't want someone who had been a banker," he says. "That's significant cant because, maybe above all else, NCNB has wanted to think of banking not as a club or a fraternity or as a calling but as one more business among the financial services."

In Gentry, NCNB found a witty, loquacious South Carolinian with a vision of where banking is headed. His duties have required both number-crunching and face-to-face deal-making skills. Gentry was a negotiator in the 1982 purchase of tiny First National Bank of Lake City, Fla., which gave NCNB its first taste of interstate expansion. He and Timothy Hartman, NCNB's chief financial officer at the time, were point men in the 1988 negotiations with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to take over the insolvent First Republic Bank Corp., Texas' largest bank.

Since 1986, when laws permitting regional interstate banking took effect, financial-performance screens of banks in Georgia and Virginia, two nearby states where NCNB...