From tellers to the top

Greenville native Kathy Heffley this week became Wells Fargo’s South Carolina president, after starting as a part-time teller in the banking business 25 years ago.

Heffley will oversee the San Francisco-based bank’s retail and small business banking operations at all 145 Wells Fargo sites across the state.

Liza Hall, the bank’s former district manager in Myrtle Beach, assumed Heffley’s former responsibilities and now serves as the institution’s Midlands-area president. Hall also started as a full-time teller, but with SouthTrust Bank in Atlanta. SouthTrust was acquired by Wachovia about 15 years ago.

Wells Fargo has added about 650 employees in South Carolina since its November 2008 merger with Wachovia in a $15.5 billion acquisition, Heffley said.

The women fill leading roles in maintaining and growing Wells Fargo’s customer base. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. rates the bank as tops in South Carolina in deposit market share, with 2015 deposits up 4 percent over a year ago to $13.8 billion, the company said Wednesday.

“Go Patriots!” Heffley said, referring to her alma mater, J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, where she was born and raised. “I love to talk about South Carolina,” she said. “It’s a great place to be from and to live.”

For 30 years, Heffley hailed from Texas, where she initially had gone intending to visit a friend for two weeks after graduating from the University of South Carolina. In a conversation with a business banker at the First State Bank of Texas’ only location at that time, Heffley was asked to come to work meeting and greeting the bank’s customers and she started as a part-time teller working 20 hours per week.

“I fell in love with it – just every aspect of it,” Heffley said. “Of being able to deal with customers, to help people, to watch people grow financially and help them succeed, and (I) grew my career from there.”

Wells Fargo acquired First State Bank of Texas in 2001 and Heffley became a district manager in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, she said.

The Wells Fargo Midlands-area president position became available in 2009, and Heffley told a bank executive she would “absolutely” love to come back home.

“That’s how I came back over here (to South Carolina), and I don’t plan on leaving South Carolina,” she said. “My whole family is still here.”

Hall, an Atlanta native, is an 18-year company veteran, which includes jobs in Asheville, N.C., Charleston and the Grand Strand before coming to Columbia.