Southern for Southerners

The South's economic resurgence has been financed largely by money from the North, but that situation is gradually changing. Among the strongest challenges to the North's dominance of Southern finance is an institution revered by Southerners but little known to most other Americans: North Carolina's Wachovia Bank & Trust. Situated in the South's most highly industrialized state, Wachovia (pronounced Wah-ko-via) is the biggest bank between Phila delphia and Dallas, serves 37 of the nation's 50 major corporations. Though still fairly small by Northern standards --it ranks 38th among all U.S. banks -- Wachovia has just passed $1 billion in assets. To symbolize its rising prominence, it will soon move into the Southeast's tallest building, a new, 30-story headquarters in Winston-Salem.

There is plenty of business ahead for Wachovia. Next to the Far West, the Southeast has the nation's fastest-growing economy, carried forward on a fresh wave of industry that is sweeping aside plantations and piney woods. Agriculture, long predominant, now accounts for only 10% of the region's income, and Southern industry last year provided 75,000 new jobs, 25% of all the new factory jobs in the U.S. Personal income in the Southeast has climbed 25% in the past four years, last year rose 7.7% v. 6% for the entire U.S.

Smokies to Sea. Wachovia and the Southeast have prospered together. The bank was founded in 1879 by descendants of the Moravian settlers, who named the Upper Piedmont section of the state Wachau after a pretty valley in Austria. Wachovia was a relatively quiet little bank until about ten years ago. Then, convinced that the South was headed for tremendous growth, its management speeded up the bank's expansion and made an all-out bid for the business of big corporations.

Wachovia began to grow like Southern pine. It has since acquired twelve smaller banks through mergers, opened up 66 more branches (including four trailer-banks at new shopping centers), doubled its deposits and tripled its operating income. Today it has 89 branches in 31 North Carolina towns and cities from the Smokies to the sea. Last year Wachovia's earnings rose 18%, almost twice the national average for banks, to $8,900,000. Wachovia serves as banker to the tobacco industry, but it also does business as varied as $1,000,000 loans to textile manufacturers and $ 100 loans to farmers.

Wachovia is directed by President John F. Watlington Jr., 53, the bank's chief operating officer and "inside" man, and Archie K. Davis, 54, its gregarious chairman, who handles the vital outside contacts. Both worked their way up from clerks, and both have a single goal: to finance as much Southern growth as possible with Southern money. Wachovia has the fastest-growing mortgage department and the largest auto-loan operations in the South. It keeps 20 officials on the road to promote business opportunities in North Carolina, has a top official in each branch whose job is to lure new industry. "Our future is dependent on this state and this area," says Watlington, "so it behooves us to build up."

No More Shuttle. Wachovia's success in bankrolling Southern industry has stepped up competition from New York and Boston bankers, but the bank's assets are now so considerable that Wachovia can meet practically any financing need. R. J. Reynolds officials used to shuttle to New York once a week on financing missions, but such trips are seldom necessary nowadays; they go to Wachovia. The bank's officials know their region well, and their formula for success is to stick to it. One bank officer recently had a crack at a multimillion-dollar piece of business in New York. He turned it down: too far north.

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