THE STRATEGIST.

• Author: Davis, Lisa
• Position: Frank Gentry - Brief Article

Frank Gentry reveals how the deals were cut to piece together the nation's biggest bank.

In his 27 years at Bank of America Corp. and its predecessors NationsBank and NCNB, Frank Gentry never made a loan or managed a branch. But as top corporate strategist and planner at a bank that made some 70 acquisitions in 20 years, he was at the center of the action.

He helped negotiate NCNB's first out-of-state bank acquisition, First National Bank of Lake City in Florida in 1982, and dickered with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 1988 to get Texas' largest bank, the failed First RepublicBank. As barriers to interstate banking fell, he scouted targets across the country, poring over financials, plotting strategy and helping negotiate deals.

But in January, less than two years after CEO Hugh McColl planted his flag on the West Coast, Gentry called it quits, retiring at age 57. The Clemson University professor's son hopes to settle into academia and a role in a proposed UNC-supported financial institute in Charlotte.

Gentry sat down with BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA to discuss his career, the bank and doing deals.

BNC: Were you hired away from Exxon as a strategic planner?

Addison Reece, the first chairman, decided they needed to go outside to hire a planning manager because bankers thought a long-range plan was a 90-day loan. He thought oil companies would have a better idea of what planning was about.

The bank for a long time -- at least 20 years, and you can argue that it goes back to Mr. Reece and before -- had a plan to be a growth company. As a part of that, we wanted to take a proactive attitude toward deregulation -- we really wanted to compete. We wanted to hire bright young people, and in the early days at least, we wanted to raise capital whenever we could, all part of believing we needed to be a growth company in an industry that was fundamentally not growing. In fact, if you go back, you'd be surprised at how close the size of the bank is today to the sum total of the assets of all the companies that have gone into making it up. So it has been much more consolidation than growth, but from the perspective of the old North Carolina National Bank, it is an amazing growth story. It's like 200 times in the last 20 years, $3 billion [in assets] to $600 billion.

Your first bank acquisition outside the state was through a legal loophole.

We were looking for ways to take deposits in Florida, and Paul Polking, our general counsel, found the legal authority to do it [through a trust company the bank owned there]. We had been working at that time -- [Reece successor Tom] Storrs was the leader and Joe Martin was working with him -- to get a Southeastern regional compact [a reciprocal agreement among states to allow bank acquisitions across state lines]. There wasn't a lot of interest in it. We were very interested in it. Barnett was interested in it. We were probably the only two large banks who thought it was a good idea.

After we got into Florida, all of a sudden Wachovia, First Union, C&S and a number of others thought, well, maybe this is a good idea after all. Pretty soon it passed, and we ended up with a Southeastern compact. Mr. Storrs was teased about the fact that we were the largest bank in the region he helped draw. That was probably not an accident either.

What was your experience like in Florida?

We ended up acquiring, before Barnett -- I'm pretty sure this is right -- seven of the 15 largest banks that existed when we got there, and we were still just fourth, because Barnett was acquiring, Sun was acquiring, First Union was acquiring, and after all that, we were just fourth. We thought the reason to go to Florida might have been because of the great deposit base, all the retirees. But where we found we could really make a difference was business lending, because the Florida banks by and large were so small they couldn't handle much of the loan, therefore companies didn't borrow much. Exchange Bank of Tampa had an interlocking directorate with Tampa Electric. Yet they only loaned them $5 million, because their legal limit was $7 million. Within a couple of months of being there, we were loaning them a great deal more money.

How long were you in Florida?

I was down there for three years [altogether]. It takes six months to a year before all the approvals go through [on a deal]. Our friends were asking us, 'Are you moving to Florida?' I kept saying. 'No, they need bankers. They...