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 in the press: "Go the hell back to North Carolina.") McColl never fit with the other good ole boys sitting around Charlotte in the 1960s, talking about how they were going to get rich, what they were going to do with all their money. McColl--who worked for a bank!--didn't talk about money at all.
He talked about power.
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 plaudits. On Main Street, average customers (the combined bank will have millions of them) worried about what this would mean for their accounts. And in Charlotte? McColl wasn't talking, having unloaded the big news in New York City early in the week. But from his 50th-floor office, he was surely reflecting on the inescapable truth and beauty of the First Law of Godzilla: Size does matter.
To be fair, McColl isn't the only one to have figured this out. The past month has been peppered with the kind of earthmoving financial deals that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. On the same day last week that the BankAmerica-NationsBank deal was announced, Banc One chairman John B. McCoy (who once mused that in the future the industry would have just five or six major banks) announced plans to merge his $116 billion bank with the much merged $115 billion First Chicago NBD Corp. All this came just a week after insurance and brokerage giant Travelers Group announced plans to tie the knot with Citicorp, the second largest bank in the U.S.--a $76 billion marriage, not just of services but of two industry titans: Sanford Weill, who emerged from a messenger job at Bear Stearns to conquer Wall Street; and John Reed, the no-compromises Citibanker who manhandled his firm back from the edge of insolvency in the late 1980s. Suddenly the world of finance began to look less like the Norman Rockwell thrifts that built the great American economy and more like a Picasso impression of finance, all whirring shapes and color and noise.
Like the finest Picasso paintings, the collision of these financial giants hints at a deeper, more complex revolution. The neat little boxes in which we store our finances--mortgage, cash, savings, and so on--are being subdivided in a million ways. Soon you won't recognize them individually. For instance, all your assets could be wrapped into a wealth account that is constantly on the prowl for investing opportunity worldwide.