Hugh McColl and the Second City

In nineteen eighty-three, a forty-eight-year-old banker named Hugh McColl Jr. became chief executive of North Carolina National Bank, a regional institution with headquarters on Tryon Street in Uptown Charlotte. Over the next fifteen years he would turn it into something that had never existed before in American banking: an ocean-to-ocean bank, headquartered not in New York or San Francisco but in Charlotte, North Carolina.

McColl's strategy was acquisition. He bought banks the way some executives buy lunches. In the nineteen eighties and early nineties, NCNB swallowed regional competitors across the Southeast and Southwest. The renamed NationsBank appeared in nineteen ninety-one, and by the mid-nineties it was the second-largest bank in the country.

Then in April nineteen ninety-eight, McColl engineered the largest bank merger in American history to that point. NationsBank bought BankAmerica, the San Francisco institution, for about sixty billion dollars. NationsBank was the nominal survivor, and the combined headquarters remained in Charlotte. But the merged company took the more recognizable California name: Bank of America.

The implications for Charlotte were enormous. The bank invested billions in the center city, financing residential development in Fourth Ward, the NFL stadium, the light rail infrastructure. Other financial institutions followed. By the early two thousands, Charlotte was the second-largest banking center in the United States, behind only Manhattan.

The city's skyline, its transit system, its professional sports presence: all of it traces in large part to one man's refusal to believe that major banking had to happen in New York. McColl grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina. He decided that Charlotte would be his New York. For a while at least, it worked.