Spotlight on local pioneer banking mogul Hugh McColl
Bennettsville has a powerhouse banker born within its rich history. We’ll give you all the details of his rise to international business fame.
Hugh McColl Jr., 85, is actually a fourth generation banker and former chairman and CEO of a little bank called Bank of America. Born in Bennettsville in 1935 to a cotton farmer/banker father and artist mother, McColl followed the footsteps of his paternal great-grandfather, grandfather and father in the industry – forefathers who made quite a statement in the area as attorneys, bank founders, and railroad and cotton mill developers.
McColl learned from the best at an early age, working part-time at 14 at his family’s trust company and cotton mill, keeping the books, doing some accounting and driving across the South Carolina border to make deposits. He also honed his leadership skills at a young age, voted student council president and class president his senior year at Bennettsville High in 1953. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, served a two-year tour before being honorably discharged, and returned to North Carolina, where he began working as a management trainee for American Commercial Bank in Charlotte.
In 1959, he and his wife, Jane (daughter of a banker and sister to former Congressman John Spratt), were married. Today, they have three children and eight grandchildren. McColl would go on to build an empire for his family during his life’s work, which began at that bank in Charlotte. It was here, in 1960, that McColl looked at the annual report for Bank of America, then based in San Francisco, and realized that the bank had grown more in one year than the value of his entire company. At that time, banks in the South were small and held hostage by laws that wouldn’t allow them to open branches outside their home state. Northern metropolitan banks and banks in California could handle the needs of bigger businesses – even those businesses in North Carolina. And that’s what triggered McColl’s drive to change that for the future of Southern banks: to build the largest bank in the world and the first national ocean-to-ocean bank in American history.
It all started off with a bang in 1960, when American Commercial Bank merged with Greensboro’s Security National Bank, which, together, became North Carolina National Bank (NCNB). It was an impressive growth spurt, but not enough for McColl, who transformed the regional bank into NationsBank, which would eventually become Bank of America, after a serious of carefully calculated acquisitions and mergers.
The growth only continued to snowball. At 39, McColl became president of NCNB in 1974, and in 1982, the bank purchased First National Bank of Lake City, Florida, its first major one out of state. After he was named CEO of NCNB in 1983, the bank buyouts continued to more than 200 community banks in big cities, like those in Dallas; Atlanta; Norfolk, Virginia; Chicago; St. Louis and more. But it didn’t come without blowback from state leaders, who tried to block other out-of-state banks to do the same, but Southeastern states combatted with laws to allow it. U.S. senators and congressmen in Washington didn’t support banks to go national either, until McColl met with then President Bill Clinton and, in 1994 Congress allowed banks to buy and own other banks across state lines.
This was McColl’s checkmate move: NCNB, which became NationsBank, merged with San Francisco-based BankAmerica in 1998, creating today what is Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte. Three years later, McColl retired. But he wasn’t done yet.
In 2001, McColl partnered with other Charlotte banking execs to form McColl Partners, an investment banking firm based in Charlotte and Dallas; In 2006, he co-founded Falfurrias Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Charlotte; he founded McColl Garella, an investment banking company serving women-owned firms; and more.
Today, the McColl and Bank of America names are embedded into a wide range of industries throughout the Carolinas, including the Queen City’s Bank of America Corporate Center (where it’s said McColl still has a corner office on the 41st floor); the Bank of America Stadium in Uptown Charlotte, home to the Carolina Panthers NFL Football team since 1996; a downtown hotel and restaurants; and a $13 million bus terminal, just to name a few.
While he has acquired much wealth, McColl has also given back to the communities in which he grew up, studied, and worked over the years. He endowed the Charlotte Children’s Theatre, which houses the McColl Family Theater, and the McColl Center for Visual Art; refurbished a burned-out church in Charlotte to become the McColl Center for Art + Innovation; purchased and restored one of his great-grandfather McColl’s homes in Bennettsville and donated it to Marlboro County for to utilize as its Chamber of Commerce and The South Carolina Cotton Trail; donated 400 acres on the Catawba River in York County, South Carolina, for an environmental museum; served on a number of board of directors; was integral to Charlotte’s urban redevelopment of the Third and Fourth Wards; supports Habitat for Humanity; mentored students of the McColl Business School at Queens University of Charlotte; and finances inner-city and minority-owned businesses.
For his philanthropic efforts and career achievements, McColl has his name on the business school building at his alma mater of UNC, was inducted into both the South Carolina, North Carolina, and Junior Achievement U.S. Business Halls of Fame, named Tarheel of the Year in 1997, awarded “Family Champion” by Working Mother magazine, earned the Pioneer Award from the Organization for a New Equality, won the Applause Award from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, took home the Echo Foundation’s Award Against Indifference, was named South Texan of the Year, and received the North Carolina Award for Public Service.
