NCNB Finds an Outside Bank's Welcome In Texas Can Be Cooler Than the Climate
DALLAS -- In the hard-crabble world of Texas banking, NCNB Corp. has found that no one remains a hero for long.</br></br>The North Carolina bankers, who swooped in at the end of July to rescue First RepublicBank Corp., Texas' biggest banking disaster, were sure they would win the hearts and deposits of Texans across the Lone Star State. They dispatched bankers near and far to glad-hand customers and community leaders, began cranking out loans, issued pay raises to long-neglected workers and even sent 15,000 yellow roses to its new employees.</br></br>So how do Texans show their appreciation? A Dallas newspaper columnist mocked some early NCNB radio ads as juvenile. Some rival Texas banks geared up to pick off NCNB's customer base by portraying the North Carolinians as alien predators. And scores of customers, concerned about deposit safety, yanked millions of dollars from the bank.</br></br>"We didn't have an appreciation for the mentality" of Texas bank customers, admits Kenneth D. Lewis, president of NCNB Texas National Bank.</br></br>NCNB also didn't have an appreciation for Texans' fondness for fully insured deposit packaging programs. To calm jittery customers, most big Texas banks break multimillion dollar accounts into fully insured $100,000 certificates of deposit that are spread among various banking units. But in the NCNB bailout, all First RepublicBank units became branches of the Dallas bank, preventing NCNB from circumventing the $100,000 insurance limit.