Rick Callicutt helped build a bank. His other record lasted 38 years.

Rick Callicutt’s name spent 38 years attached to a high jump record at High Point. Then a freshman came along and cleared the bar. In June 2018, Callicutt returned to the university to celebrate the student who had displaced him. Banking offers many opportunities to congratulate yourself. This was an opportunity to congratulate somebody else, and he took it.

The moment belongs beside the more familiar outline of Richard D. Callicutt II’s career: a founding member of Bank of North Carolina’s team, its eventual chief executive, and later Pinnacle’s chairman for the Carolinas and Virginia. He helped build a bank that joined Pinnacle in a transaction announced at approximately $1.9 billion. Yet the sports story supplies something the valuation cannot: a picture of an old connection still being enjoyed.

Much of his working life has unfolded within reach of those college memories. Thomasville supplied the startup. High Point supplied a university, a corporate base and a set of family ties. The banking business grew across state lines; the personal geography remained remarkably compact.

A first job, then a long apprenticeship

Callicutt graduated from High Point in 1980 with a business administration degree. Four days later, he started his first banking job. There is a pleasing lack of ceremony about that interval. Graduation photographs had scarcely become family history before work began.

His early career included Wachovia and First Union, with responsibilities in retail banking management and credit administration. In 1991, he joined the new Bank of North Carolina as a senior lender. BNC began in Thomasville, with modest resources and the ambitions customary to a startup. Its earliest premises included a small trailer. Banking can acquire a considerable taste for marble; this enterprise began with rather less architectural persuasion.

The subsequent résumé shows a banker learning the institution from several directions. Credit, compliance and operations all became part of his remit. Those functions have an intimate relationship with whether a bank’s promises can survive an ordinary working week. A lender must judge a proposal. An operator must make the institution capable of delivering it.

In October 2009, Callicutt became the bank’s president and chief operating officer. The assignment covered retail and commercial banking, branches and mortgages. Swope Montgomery remained chief executive. The division of responsibilities made the succession visible well before the eventual handover.

By then, BNC had 17 branches, 264 employees and $1.67 billion in assets. Those figures describe an institution already far removed from its founding scale. They also put Callicutt’s promotion in perspective: he was taking responsibility for an operation he had helped develop over 18 years.

The handover had been years in the making

The next title arrived in June 2013. Callicutt became president and chief executive of BNC Bancorp and chief executive of Bank of North Carolina, succeeding Montgomery. It was a change at the top with a substantial overlap underneath. The outgoing leader knew his successor’s work; the incoming leader knew the institution.

After the transition, Callicutt described Montgomery as a friend and credited him with preparing him over the preceding decade. Montgomery stayed involved as vice chairman. The account gives the succession a human scale: responsibility passed through a working relationship that had lasted considerably longer than an executive search.

The bank was also reorganizing other senior responsibilities. David Spencer continued in finance leadership, while colleagues took on accounting, technology and market leadership duties. A chief executive’s appointment makes a convenient headline. The supporting appointments explain how a growing company expects the work to get done.

That operational experience mattered because BNC was buying banks. In December 2013, it announced agreements involving Home Savings Bank in Albemarle and Harrington Bank in Chapel Hill. The attractions included market access, customer relationships and a better balance of funding and assets. The mechanics included conversion work, product training and employee development.

Callicutt’s discussion of the transactions lingered on infrastructure and project management. It is an unfashionably useful emphasis. A deal can be announced in a morning. Teaching people the systems, keeping customers informed and joining two organizations requires a much longer attention span.

Growth, with the paperwork left in

By 2016, BNC had expanded across the Carolinas and Virginia. Its acquisitions gave Callicutt repeated practice at a task that is easy to compress into a single verb: integrate. He described a dedicated team working through technology, education and conversions, followed by detailed reviews before the next transaction.

His answer made improvement sound cumulative. The previous deal supplied lessons for the next one. There was no suggestion that a signed agreement relieved the buyer of the obligation to learn.

The expansion also encountered resistance. Community Reinvestment Act challenges delayed the proposed High Point Bank and Southcoast transactions. Callicutt acknowledged the delays and said the process was making the bank more attentive to communication and priorities. The episode belongs in the growth story because expansion involves obligations to communities as well as negotiations between boards.

In June 2016, he began a year as chair of the North Carolina Bankers Association. He argued that smaller banks faced a difficult regulatory burden and sought changes that would help community banking. His position reflected the practical concerns of a banker participating in consolidation while also speaking for an industry whose smaller institutions were under pressure.

When the buyer became part of a bigger bank

In January 2017, Pinnacle and BNC announced their agreement to combine. The proposed all-stock transaction valued BNC at about $1.9 billion. For a bank that had spent years expanding through acquisitions, becoming part of another institution changed the direction of the familiar story.

Callicutt’s explanation of BNC’s growth was broader than a tally of purchases. Acquisitions had helped reposition its funding and property-lending exposure, while recruiting experienced bankers and entering markets also contributed. He wanted the continuing business to be understood alongside the transactions. Buying an institution could establish a presence; the people working there still had to win business.

The merger closed on June 16, 2017. On the financial information used at closing, the combined company had more than $20 billion in assets. Pinnacle was taking its model beyond Tennessee into the Carolinas and Virginia, and Callicutt became chairman for that region.

BNC’s name remained briefly, then changed to Pinnacle in September. There were sign unveilings in six markets, followed by further systems and operational conversion work. Corporate identity could change on an appointed day. The practical business of joining institutions continued afterward. Callicutt’s new role kept him involved in the region where he had spent the BNC years.

The lunch his mother did not see coming

The following spring brought an announcement with a smaller audience and a different purpose. Barbara Callicutt arrived at a High Point University luncheon in April 2018 without knowing that her son had helped arrange it as a surprise. Rick had pledged $300,000 to create an endowed scholarship in her name.

The Barbara Frisbee Callicutt Endowed Scholarship supports elementary education students with demonstrated financial need. Barbara graduated from High Point in 1965 and worked in the Davidson County School System. The award’s subject followed her profession. Her daughter, Rick’s sister Pam Hall, also studied at High Point and spent more than 30 years teaching elementary school in Davidson County.

For Callicutt, the university connection crossed three generations: his mother, his sister, himself and his daughter had all graduated there. He wanted future students to have access to the education his family had received. His support also included a $1 million gift for the university’s 370-seat Callicutt Auditorium.

The scholarship gives a large banking career a particularly local consequence. Its beneficiaries study for a profession his family knows well. Its name honors somebody whose work took place in classrooms. The surprise, meanwhile, suggests that even a banker accustomed to formal announcements could appreciate an occasion improved by withholding the agenda.

A new name on the record wall

Weeks later, the university celebrated another transfer. Gabriel Stainback had broken Callicutt’s 1980 high jump record during the Big South Championships in May 2018. At the June celebration, the new record holder installed his name on the wall alongside his predecessor’s.

“Gabriel is a phenomenal representative of HPU.”

Rick Callicutt, June 2018

Callicutt had played basketball as well as competing in track at college, and his athletic involvement continued afterward. By 2009, he had spent nine years coaching girls’ AAU basketball. The record was one thread in a longer sporting life. In 2019, High Point named him Alumnus of the Year, recognizing a relationship that had continued well beyond graduation.

The next merger, the familiar work

Callicutt’s regional leadership continued into Pinnacle’s combination with Synovus in January 2026. North Carolina market appointments announced before closing emphasized local leadership and decision-making. It was another occasion when the organization was changing above the level of the customer’s everyday banking relationship.

In September 2026, Pinnacle reported $7.7 billion in North Carolina deposits as of June 30, up $762 million statewide. It ranked tenth in the state. Callicutt’s response credited clients and colleagues, describing growth as something that follows when people deepen a relationship or bring one over from elsewhere.

There is continuity in that emphasis. The institution has grown, the names on the signs have changed, and the scale of the business has widened. The work still requires somebody to trust the people across the desk. Callicutt’s public story keeps returning to those people: a predecessor who prepared him, colleagues doing conversions, students getting an opportunity, a mother invited to lunch.

And, on one agreeable afternoon, a younger athlete whose name deserved a place on the wall.