In a little more than a year, Eugene Taylor, armed with $900 million in private equity capital, has built North American Financial Holdings Inc. into a $7.3 billion-asset bank holding company by buying up struggling banks. It's familiar territory for Taylor, 62, who spent nearly four decades at the behemoth Bank of America Corp., which became the nation's largest bank by assets mostly through a steady stream of acquisitions.

Now Taylor is chairman and CEO of Charlotte, N.C.-based NAFH, which he co-founded with Christopher Marshall, another BofA veteran, with an eye toward acquiring and rehabilitating struggling and failed banks, mostly in the Southeast. NAFH began looking for private equity investors in late 2009, just as other banking pros formed similar ventures hoping to cash in on the industry's woes. But when it came to fundraising, NAFH's ties to BofA gave it an edge.

"It was a point in time when anyone who had a PowerPoint and a stapler was putting together a presentation," says Marshall, NAFH's CFO. "We had a track record of operating banks that added a degree of comfort that the average management team just didn't have."

Taylor is a former BofA vice chairman who began his career at its predecessor, North Carolina National Bank, in 1969. Marshall served alongside him from 2000 to 2006 in various top operational roles. They are joined at NAFH by fellow co-founders Bruce Singletary, a 31-year BofA veteran, mostly in risk management, and former Morgan Stanley managing director Kenneth Posner.

Those résumés helped NAFH win backing from Crestview Partners LP, Oak Hill Advisors LP and Falfurrias Capital Partners, a Charlotte-based firm with its own BofA pedigree; it was co-founded by Marc Oken, a former BofA CFO, and Hugh McColl Jr., BofA's chairman and CEO from 1983 to 2001. NAFH made its first acquisition, Naples, Fla.-based TIB Financial Corp., for $175 million, in June 2010.

It picked up three failed banks the following month: Turnberry Bank in Aventura, Fla., Metro Bank of Dade County in Miami and First National Bank of the South in Spartanburg, S.C. In November, it paid $181 million for an 85% stake in Raleigh, N.C.-based Capital Bank Corp.

NAFH made its latest deal earlier this month, moving into Tennessee with its purchase of a 90.1% stake of Green Bankshares Inc. for $217 million. As a result of that deal, NAFH now has a 149-branch network, which Taylor and Marshall monitor closely by making frequent location visits and posing as prospective customers. It was through such visits to TIB, for example, that the pair learned that the "workforce was not proactively selling" the bank's products, Marshall says.

To rectify that, NAFH mandated daily sales calls with the bank's staff, in which Marshall and Taylor participated for the first four months. They also conduct weekly sales calls with commercial lenders across all of NAFH's branches.

Such close involvement with their acquired banks reflects Taylor's and Marshall's banking backgrounds. Taylor, who began his career in the credit training department of North Carolina National Bank, eventually became president of BofA's consumer and commercial bank and its global corporate investment bank.

He was there when NCNB acquired Atlanta's C&S/Sovran Corp. in 1991, becoming NationsBank, and seven years later, when NationsBank acquired Bank of America and took its name. Marshall, 51, joined BofA in 2000 from Honeywell International Inc. as CFO of global treasury, technology and operations. He rose to COO of global consumer and small-business banking at BofA, then moved to Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bancorp in 2006 as CFO.

Before launching NAFH, both men tried their hands at private equity. Upon leaving BofA in 2007, Taylor became an adviser to Fortress Investment Group LLC, where he was pegged to chair a Florida bank the firm sought but failed to acquire in 2009.

Marshall, meanwhile, signed on with Blackstone Group LP in 2008 after working with the firm on its planned but never completed acquisition of Fifth Third's credit-card-processing business. His mandate was to advise Blackstone on formulating a bank acquisition strategy.

But no deals materialized, and Marshall, like Taylor, yearned to once again operate banks. "Private equity are investors, and we're bankers," says Marshall. So in 2009, they launched NAFH. The firm's acquisitive romp is likely to continue, as it can add at least $1.5 billion in assets without having to raise more capital. Still, Marshall says, sellers tend to not be realistic about their credit losses, presenting a challenge in negotiating prices. "We've bought one bank for every 10 we've met with," he says.

Now, she says, banks are on the hunt for advisory talent once again.

In early 2010, banks targeted "rainmakers who could run the groups and who had certain hot specialties," says Branthover. "Now they are drifting down to the managing director level -- the real worker bees that really do the deals."

Rothschild is one firm that's in recruiting mode, after two quiet years. In June, it brought in James Lawrence, the former CFO of consumer products giant Unilever NV/plc, as CEO of Rothschild North America and co-head of global investment banking. It has also added 13 senior-level North American M&A advisers in the past year, including Bob Gibson and Paul Moynihan, to focus on the oil and gas sector out of the firm's new Calgary, Alberta, office. They were most recently principals of Mustang Capital Partners, a boutique they formed in 2002.

Rothschild is now looking to add lower-level associate positions to support those senior bankers, with the goal of increasing its 120-member North American advisory team to 140 by year's end. And while Rothschild does not participate in sectors such as financial institutions, healthcare and domestic energy, Lawrence says he has "been talking to" bankers in those areas and "with the right people at the right time, we may enter them."

But finding the right people might be difficult, as banks are now competing for a smaller pool of the most accomplished bankers. "Post-crisis, the banks realized that there is only a certain number of superstars that can survive anything," says Branthover. "Now the hiring process is longer and [banks] are pickier than ever. They are in the biggest war for talent they have ever been in."

One result is that base salaries have gone up by as much as 50% in the past year, she says.

Some banks avoided the current talent war by staffing up during down times. New York-based Greenhill & Co. was "aggressive during the crisis," increasing its managing director roster from about 30 to 70 between 2008 and 2010 at a time when "so many high-quality people were available," says Scott Bok, co-CEO. In late 2008 and 2009, Greenhill announced 25 senior-level hires, compared with eight in 2010. Additions include Steven Friedman, former co-head of UBS' North American insurance practice, and George Matsuzaka, an executive director in UBS' financial institutions group, who both joined in April 2009.

But investors are still waiting for the hiring spree to pay off. Greenhill's shares are down about 30% since the beginning of the year. The firm's employee compensation and benefits expenses for 2010 jumped to nearly $159.9 million from $138.3 million for 2009, while net income slipped to $39.4 million from $71 million. Things got worse in the first quarter of this year, as Greenhill suffered a $1.6 million loss. According to Bok, the firm is now in "a period of digestion" and is integrating its staff.

New York's Oppenheimer & Co. also added a number of senior-level M&A bankers post-crisis across a variety of verticals, says managing director and head of investment banking Marshall Heinberg. He specifically cites the August 2009 hiring of industrial growth and services managing director Hisham Barghout from Jefferies & Co., where he was managing director of aerospace and defense.

Heinberg points out that Barghout has already worked on two deals this year for Oppenheimer, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Inc.'s $270 million acquisition of Herley Industries Inc. and a yet-to-be-announced transaction.

Boutiques and midsized investment banks such as Oppenheimer may be the largest source of the advisory hiring over the next year. "Generally, [smaller banks] are the lead in hiring -- they tend to be a bit more responsive and flexible," says Carl Miller, chief executive of Los Angeles-based financial services recruiter Russell Stephens LLC.

But Miller's expectations are more tempered than some of his peers. "M&A has to pick up a great deal before we see a sizable increase in head count in that marketplace," he says.