Word: mccoll
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...Hugh McColl is what southerners call "a firecracker of a man." He is a tiny stick of dynamite: 5 ft. 6 3/4 in. tall, with a big mouth and a short fuse. Once, deep into a negotiation to grab a billion-dollar bank, he waited for words until an idea materialized somewhere out of that Marine Corps (1957-59) mind, and he unloaded over the phone at the poor gentleman on the other end: "My board is meeting, and we've gone too far. I've got to launch my missiles!" (The not-so-gentlemanly reply, reported later...
These days he has plenty of both. In the past 10 years, as international banks have struggled with competitors from American Express to America Online, McColl has engineered a kind of banking miracle in homey Charlotte, a deus ex machina where the machina is his very own NationsBank automated-teller machines, and the deus wears cowboy boots. Last week McColl announced the boldest deal yet: a plan to merge NationsBank with California-based BankAmerica to create a golden Godzilla with deposits of $346 billion. On Wall Street, where financial stocks have sizzled this year, the marriage was greeted with huge...
...McColl's buyouts, like his climbs, have been strewn with rocks. After spending $9.6 billion for Boatmen's Bancshares in St. Louis, Mo., in January 1997, he waited barely a year to announce a $15.5 billion deal to buy Barnett. Then he backed away from a pledge to cut $450 million out of Barnett's costs this year because of difficulty digesting the earlier acquisition. Nonetheless, NationsBank is shedding 200 branches in Florida (including 124 that state regulators have ordered it to divest) and reducing the merged workforce from 30,000 to 22,000. Gleeful local rivals have launched...
Despite such horror stories, the pace of bank mergers is likely to accelerate as McColl and his rivals battle for market share. "The next five years will make the past five look tame," says Lenny Mendonca, a senior partner at the McKinsey consulting firm. Mendonca says that the number of large national banks could shrink from about 40 today to as few as six or eight shortly after the turn of the century...
Whatever the tally, McColl insists that NationsBank will be among the survivors. And he's currently eyeing California, where NationsBank has no branches as yet. "Will we ever stop expanding our company and be satisfied with what we have?" he asks. "No! We're interested in California, and we're interested in a lot of things." The trick will be to keep the bank's customers interested as well...