Question: I live in the little town of Richfield, and it’s suddenly getting developed. I have a little bank where the teller passes me eggs through the pass through with my checks. So, from the point of view of that Mayberry mentality, why can’t a bank like CCB just stay little?

Roessler: I think they can.What has not changed for CCB over a hundred years or 97 years is the people we serve — of being individuals or small to medium-sized business. That’s always been our constituency. What has changed are those individuals and those businesses. They’ve become a lot more sophisticated and they expect more.

So, we have two choices. If Mayberry doesn’t change, we don’t have to change. If Mayberry’s happy, we re happy. And when it changes, then we either change or perish. And so that’s our choices. You know, in the early ’90s we decided well, here we are based in the Triangle, it’s great. Eventually we did expand but always kept the community-type approach. You know, I don’t know how many communities we have now, well over 40 or 50, we’re serving, but we always put that community person there.

And a lot of people have been there 10, 15, 25 years, part of the Rotary or the Chamber, or the other civic things with church and hospitals and the United Way — part of the community. Where the larger banks have had their community person like a revolving door. It’s been a training ground: OK, from Salisbury you re going to go to Winston-Salem and from Winston-Salem, you’re going to run Kansas.

We do some of that obviously, but not nearly as much. And that’s our advantage. We’ve been part of that Mayberry community, but with a little bit of a bigger bank flavor, in terms of product, development, and I think, a whole array of products. Whether it’s branches or Internet or in-store banking, we can really serve you, wherever you work, shop, or live. You know, that’s a part of the service. And the delivery, internal delivery. So, that’s taken money and strength to do, but then we de-centralized that local person, and then he or she in 90 percent of the cases can make the decision. If you want a loan or something, they can approve it there, and get quick feedback. So, hopefully we’ve kept the best of both worlds. We still think and act like a small bank; but we have the firepower of a bigger bank behind us for product and delivery.

It’s that old adage we keep using, “high touch and high tech,” in that order. We want the high touch, but we had to get more of the high tech.

Question: When you merge two different bank systems like this, what are the risks?

Roessler:There’s two risks really. One’s the short-term risk, and if you pull it off, you get together and make programming changes so all systems are compatible and people are working off the same policies and procedures. That’s the short-term risk.

The longer-term risk is really saying, “Can we learn from them (NCBC) and do what they’re doing in our culture? And can they learn from us and do what we do better in theirs?” And at that point, if you can get those two things to blend, then you really are clicking. Another part of the longer-term, I think, what I call it is leverage. And the leverage there, is they got all these retailings to add to our programs. … the same facility and the same store, but now they’re offering you more products. If you can do that the customer benefits but obviously so does the profitability.

Question: Would it be accurate to say that you were looking at the likelihood that if you couldn’t provide more and more contemporary product, you would lose customers?

Roessler: We talk about life in terms of motivation. Another point in corporate life or individual life is to anticipate. To be honest with you, nothing was broken at CCB. To wake up some morning and say, “Gosh, we’re going to lose all these customers,”I didn’t anticipate that.

When I woke up, I heard, “Oh, we have a better chance of retaining our existing customers, we have a better chance to sell more to our existing customers.” And thirdly, do we have an opportunity to attract more customers? And the answer came back, yes, yes and yes. It wasn’t so much of fear of losing; it was the opportunity to gain.

Question: They called you?

Roessler: They did. They approached us. We never went out looking. To tell you the truth, it may sound better if we did.

Question: If it goes through, is there any part of the change you think is going to be especially thorny?

Roessler: What’s hanging out there is, we said, “OK, we’re going to get these kinds of savings. We convert systems by year end, so there’s dollar amounts out there, there’s time limits.” I’m talking short term, again. So in terms of thorny, there are certain deals done in the past. Remember guilt by association. You’re in the middle of a merger, so it’s got to be risky. We told people we don’t think ours is as risky, but if we don’t deliver on time, or if we don’t get the costs savings that were indicated, then that’s thorny.