Blanchard’s departure one for history books in Columbus banking

It’s not quite the end of an era of the Blanchard name, perhaps. But it’s certainly a distinctive chapter in the history books of Columbus Bank and Trust, with a third generation of the family to serve as president calling it a career at the end of this year.

The bank’s parent company, Synovus Financial Corp., announced Thursday that William “Billy” Blanchard is departing the city’s largest bank to work with his father at Jordan-Blanchard Capital. Blanchard’s father, James H. Blanchard, is a partner with The Jordan Company in the private investment firm located on River Road in Columbus.

Billy Blanchard, 45, who will remain vice chairman of CB&T’s advisory board, will be succeeded by Heath Schondelmayer, who has been with Synovus nearly two decades and now is senior vice president over its Private Wealth Management group.

“I don’t think it’s an end of an era because I do look forward to being a part of this board,” Billy Blanchard said Friday in an interview. “The board plays an important role in the life of CB&T and I’m going to have a chance on a very regular basis to be connected to Heath and to his team. I’m going to help them where I can to grow the bank and do the kinds of things a director ought to do. I’m very excited.”

His father, Jim Blanchard, is a retired Synovus chairman and chief executive officer who followed in his own dads’s footsteps, taking the helm of Columbus Bank and Trust himself in 1971. Billy Blanchard’s grandfather, James W. Blanchard, took the top spot in 1957 and led the bank for more than a decade until his early death. Under his tutelage, CB&T became one of the first banks in the United States to issue charge cards, which are ubiquitous today.

For those counting, that’s a Blanchard leading the Columbus-based bank or its holding company for nearly 60 years.

“There’s a very deep and long connection to this bank with my family,” Billy Blanchard said. “I’ve worked here for 20 years, but my whole life my dad was working here. So I’ve grown up connected to this company and connected to the people in it.”

Schondelmayer, 41, started with the bank in 1997 and has worked his way up its ranks from management trainee to heading the wealth management operation. In between, he spent time in various areas, including branch banking, correspondent banking and credit-underwriting.

A native of Augusta, Ga., Schondelmayer graduated with a finance degree from the University of Georgia. He has an MBA from Columbus State University and also is a graduate of the Stonier Graduate School of Banking.

He takes the new job on Jan. 1.

“There are a lot of emotions running through me,” Schondelmayer said Friday. “I’m approaching 20 years being here with Synovus. It’s all I’ve ever known. Billy talked about the culture of this organization. It’s in my DNA in a big way. I very much understand the weight of this job. I understand the leadership role that CB&T plays in this community.”

Schondelmayer also knows he is taking charge of a financial institution that has a long lineage, with roots that date to the late 19th century when an executive of a textile mill overlooking the Chattahoochee River took the money of a worker and put it in the factory’s safe so that she would not lose the cash.

As the story goes on the company’s website, “The worker’s dress became tangled in factory machinery, and money she had sewn into her hem spilled onto the floor. Explaining she felt this was the safest place to keep her savings, a mill executive offered instead to secure her money in the mill safe and pay her interest. That same service was soon offered to all the workers, and those deposits marked the beginning of Synovus.”

As the calendar turns the page to 2017, Billy Blanchard will leave the bank he started with in 1995, the year his father and the company’s board of directors pulled the trigger on a major acquisition by Synovus of National Bank of South Carolina. Through the years, he worked as a credit analyst, business development officer, commercial lender and executive vice president of retail banking.

It was the younger Blanchard’s dad, the homespun Jim Blanchard, that set the tone for his son. After taking charge of Columbus Bank and Trust at age 28, he helped push the city forward from a sleepy mill town to a growing urban area. Along the way, the company called Total System Services, now known as TSYS, was set up as a major credit-card processor and subsidiary of Synovus, eventually being spun off as a publicly traded stand-alone firm.

There was growth under Jim Blanchard, with Synovus acquiring other financial institutions and becoming a major player in the Southeast as a regional bank. Billy’s father stepped down as CEO in 2005, just a few years before the housing market and financial crises would spark a Great Recession, leading to three years of losses for Synovus and a downsizing exacerbated by the overall transition from branch banking to Internet and smartphone banking.

“It was very painful. It was like a serious illness of one of my children,” Jim Blanchard said of the downturn in a 2015 Ledger-Enquirer interview. “I think this is the cycle most people go through when they hit really difficult times. You're kind of in denial a little bit that it could really be this bad and then you get adjusted to the reality and you have concerns about the future. And then you begin to see the opportunity for recovery.”

In the end, however, through the ups and downs, Jim Blanchard had racked up a number of honors. Those included being named “Georgian of the Year” by Georgia Trend magazine in 2003, being listed among the “25 Most Influential People in Financial Services” by US Banker magazine in 2005, and being inducted into the “Most Influential Georgians Hall of Fame” by Georgia Trend in 2006.

On Friday, Jim Blanchard simply said he was proud of his son and the family’s six-decade contribution to Columbus Bank and Trust and Synovus.

“It’s a long string of events and circumstances that makes it pretty meaningful for the Blanchard family,” he said. “We’ve got CB&T and Synovus blood that runs through our veins. Whether we’re active down there or not, we’re all just welded together with history and the traditions and the culture and the whole thing.”

Both father and son said they are looking forward to the new chapter of their lives in which they will be working together at Jordan-Blanchard Capital. Billy Blanchard, who called it a “really special” opportunity, will become an investor and take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

“He doesn’t have any particular duties other than that at this point,” Jim Blanchard said. “I think they’re just going to see where it gravitates, and what piece of what we do interests him the most and see how it evolves.”

Billy Blanchard, as he became the 10th president of CB&T in 2009, succeeding Steve Melton, acknowledged at the time that the shoes of his father and grandfather were pretty big to even think about filling. But he’s grown the company overall.

As he became president, the severe recession had just officially ended, but CB&T still had 51 percent of the local bank market with $2.8 billion in deposits, trailed by Wachovia’s 15 percent and SunTrust’s 9 percent, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Today, as the third-generation Blanchard prepares to depart, Columbus Bank and Trust, with nearly $4.3 billion in deposits, commands just over 64 percent market share in the city. That compares to a market share of nearly 13 percent for Wells Fargo and just over 10 percent for SunTrust Bank.

“He’s tremendous. He’s one of the greatest leaders that I’ve ever seen,” Jim Blanchard said of his son. “He has a tremendous compassion for people, his customers, the community. There’s nobody I know that’s more involved and more intact with the leadership of Columbus, Georgia, at this point. I just think in every respect he’s a champion. I’m very proud of him.”

Despite leaving the very visible job of CB&T president, Billy Blanchard said he doesn’t plan to be a stranger at all in the community. He is scheduled to become chair of the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce in 2017, and he’s leading the Columbus 2025 fundraising effort.

“I don’t intend to let go of the things in the community that I’m involved in. I’m very excited and energized to continue in those things,” said Blanchard, who confided there still is a bit of “sadness” about letting go of Columbus Bank and Trust as an active day-to-day executive.

“After 22 years, you build long relationships, especially in a company like this where you kind of feel like family — significant, real and deep relationships.” he said. “But I feel very confident about the team and where they are in their ability to do this work and be successful. I feel very confident about Heath and his ability in this role to fill these shoes. He’s going to do a super job. So there’s an excitement about that and an energy around the idea that, when there’s a change, there’s new thought and it creates new energy. And there will be opportunities to do things a little different, and that can be really healthy and good for an organization.”

Synovus, headquartered in downtown Columbus, is a regional bank with 28 locally branded divisions in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. It oversees about $30 billion in assets.

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 6:41 PM with the headline "Blanchard’s departure one for history books in Columbus banking."