Malcolm Holland has been called lots of things in his long and successful banking career: Visionary executive, talented entrepreneur and skilled negotiator. But more recently, Holland is being hailed as a golf talent scout and marketing guru.
Holland is the CEO and chairman of Veritex Community Bank, the Texas bank that’s spread all over Collin County and the state. And he’s the one who came up with a unique and creative marketing plan by sponsoring local pro golfers to promote his statewide banks in their far-flung golfing travels.
Sponsorships are nothing new to golf, but they typically are luxury watches, high-end automobiles, athletic wear brands. But banks? And local ones at that? The addition of banks, especially a local one with outlets only in Texas like Veritex is certainly different, and so is Holland’s approach. It’s a good idea — even better when the local pros are some of the biggest names in the game, including the number-one ranked player in the world.
Holland isn’t just some banker with a marketing idea. He has a decades-long association with the North Texas golfers, golf figures and organizations. He is a longtime supporter of the Northern Texas PGA, based in Frisco, a graduate of golf powerhouse SMU and involved in just about every aspect of local golf. He’s even a member of the Texas Golf Hall of Fame.
“I’m using my passion in the game and made it a passion of the business,” Holland says. “I may stop at some point, but I consider this very successful.”
To achieve all of that, Holland said he uses 60% of the bank’s annual marketing budget on the sponsorships at a figure he calls, “way more than a million dollars.”
This is a multi-million dollar bet that, potentially, has national complications.
Using the statewide bank marketing budget, Hollard and his team, which includes Golf Marketing VP Matt Sawicki and his son Charlie, who had a brief run in professional golf, currently have 29 Texas golfers under contract as of early 2025.
The roster includes Plano’s Pierson and Parker Coody, Colleyville’s Ryan Palmer, senior tour player Flower Mound’s Paul Stankowski and the world’s number-one-ranked golfer Scottie Scheffler of Dallas.
“Sponsorships are definitely unique and so are the relationships that can come with them, but having a friend and people I know and trust within Veritex does make the sponsorship feel more than just a business deal and something I’ve greatly appreciated,” says Coody, who remains to loyal Holland and Veritex for the exact same reason as Scheffler: he connected with them early in his career and has remained loyal ever since.
“When you’re just starting out, any sponsor you have is great and appreciative,” Scheffler says of his relationship with Veritex. “I value loyalty and that’s what I appreciate about Malcolm and Veritex.”
Spotting Talent
Holland had seen plenty of amateur golfers and sponsorships during his years watching his son Charlie locally and through his SMU connection and its golf program. It was Mustangs player now pro golf star Bryson DeChambeau who first got him thinking about merging his passion for golf and his day job.
“You know, obviously Charlie had something to do with it, but I was Bryson's mentor at SMU so when he turned professional in 2016, his mother Jan asked me if I would help him find an agent,” says Holland. “So I did and I ended up putting together, you know, an agent review and ended up selecting a young man named Brett Falkoff.” Holland was just trying to help out a young prospect, and it was Falkoff who offered to put Veritex on Bryson’s golf bag as a thank-you.
“I said sure and I paid Bryson a little something but not much and so I had my bank’s name on his bag,” says Holland. That led to him signing local golfer Carlos Ortiz, and the marketing plan continued to snowball. “I looked up one day and we had 27 players and we had corporate outings and I said we've created a business by accident.”
Teeing Up Loyalty
Holland knows potential when he sees it — something that’s helped him in business and, now, has helped in spotting future recruits. He knew Scottie Scheffler was a solid player in college at the University of Texas, but even he had no idea Scheffler would emerge as the new superstar face of professional golf in the United States, with a large Veritex bank logo on his bag. Nobody did.
“When Scottie got out of school, he signed a deal with Nike, which he still has today and then I was right there as one of the first guys to help him,” said Holland. “I didn't know he was going to be number one in the world, heck no one did, but I knew he’d be a good player and it paid off.”
That’s why as Scheffler has rocketed up the professional golf ladder with his second Masters tournament title and an Olympic Gold Medal (among nine pro victories in 2024), and as he could command a seven-to-eight-figure sum from any sponsor he chooses, the top-ranked player remained loyal. “When somebody supports you from day one when you don’t have status on any tour, that’s pretty unique and somebody I want to stay with for a long time,” Scheffler adds.
The amount Holland can pay has gone up some, he says.“It’s very reasonable,” he adds. “Scottie is a very relational person and so are we as a bank.”
The Importance Of No. 1
Shawn Spieth, father of former world No.1 golfer, Dallas-native Jordan Spieth, formed MVPindex, a company to track sponsor interactions with golfers. According to him, most golfers make the majority of their money on the course with their play not from sponsorships. The exception is the top level golfers like Scheffler and Spieth, when he was world No. 1, who reap the rich commercial benefits of their good play on the course.
Holland’s plan, he says, started as a passion play. “Now he has been doing it for a while, getting players while they are young before they made it big and I would think it has paid off for him and the bank,” he says. Spieth’s son didn’t sign with Holland because the bank hadn’t yet launched his golf branding initiative. Says Spieth, “I have people ask me all the time why Jordan is not with Veritex, it’s because they weren’t doing this when he first started out and they probably couldn’t afford him now.” Jordan Spieth turned pro in 2012 long before the local bank got into the golf sponsorship business.
Spieth senior adds the most desirable and expensive sponsor location is either on the shirt chest front or the hat. A less expensive location is the golf bag, but if you’re anywhere near the world’s best golf, it’s a big branding win.
Masterful Lucky Break
The financial and marketing light really went on for Holland and Veritex at the 2023 Masters Tournament when Holland, with a timely assist from Scheffler, tracked little-known Texas golfer Sam Bennett, who had won the US Amateur the year before and had qualified to play in the ‘23 Masters.
“You know that was a very, very fortunate, lucky situation,” says Holland. “I knew that he had won the U.S. amateur and Scottie had won the Masters the year before so I knew Sam would be playing with Scottie in the first two rounds. I thought that it would be cool that I got Scottie in the bag so let’s see if I can go get Sam locked down.”
So Holland went out and found Bennett, adding, “I paid him a very small amount of money and put our name on his shirt and he ended up playing really well.”
So well that Bennett, was in third place going into the weekend at Augusta National Golf Club, the best position by an amateur in 50 years and was seventh going to the final round. After the final round, Scheffler was the defending champion and Bennett was there as the amateur for the award presentation at Butler Cabin at Augusta National.
The deal was only for the logo on Bennett’s shirt, but the weather was cold on Sunday, so he wore a sweat for most of the day. At the awards ceremony, fellow Vertix golfer Scheffler turned to Bennett and told him to take the sweater off.
“Sam asked Scottie why, point out it was cold,” says Holland, “but Scottie insisted by saying, ‘Sam, you're in the new world now, you have corporate sponsors and you need to show off the sponsor logo every time you can.’”
“That was probably my greatest return for the investment I made,” says Holland. “The word I got is the $10,000 investment I made was worth more than $3 million of TV time for the bank.”
Sponsorship Rules
Holland has only a few basic rules for local players he pays to endorse his bank.
“I have two prerequisites: one is you’ve got to be a good ambassador for our company, not be a total screwup and second, you need to live in Texas,” he says. “Now, I have broken that rule twice, but I’ve regretted it and I'm going back to Texas only.”
Of course, there is a third rule that any businessman banker would appreciate.
“Well, I mean one of our deals is if you're going to be one of our ambassadors, you have to bank here,” he says. “I'm not going to send your check to Bank of America or JP Morgan so you have to have an account here and so you see what we can provide them, and I can tell you what we do.”
Local Drive
Having a local company on your clothing instead of a large national brand can pay off in other ways.
“Representing a local brand is always cool,” said Senior Tour player Paul Stankowski. “They have a growing great reputation, and it seems that when I wear my Veritex logoed gear to practice at my club I often have people commenting on how they enjoy working with their local Veritex branch.”
Cooper Dossey, a young local professional golfer with Collin County ties struggling to make it big on the PGA Tour stage, said the help of a local company who he has close ties with has made all the difference
“Malcolm has instilled incredible confidence and self-belief in me simply through his encouragement and support of my career,” says Dossey. “His generosity and kindness have greatly helped my wife Ashley and I pursue our dream to be on the PGA Tour one day.”
For every Scheffler or Bennett who strikes it big for themselves or the bank, there is a chance the sponsored player will never make it, like Holland’s son Charlie. “He was good, just not good enough,” Holland recalls about his son.
“It’s getting harder to find the right players because the top 100 players get all the attention, and the lower levels don’t get much,” says Holland.
But it’s exactly the future success of golf that Holland is banking on, and he’s so serious about this that he trademarked the phrase, ‘Golf Bank of Texas,’ in 2024.
“Malcolm has a brilliant entrepreneurial mind and he is building a narrative to help golfers in this area. We know them and they know us and it all works well together,” said Matt Sawicki, who spent more than a decade working with the United States Golf Association before coming on with Veritex in 2022.
In a possible sign of respect or just picking up on a good idea, other regional banks are starting to follow the Veritex plan and marketing angle. Arkansas-based Simmons Bank, a similar sized bank as Veritex, became title sponsor of a Champions Tour, 50-and-older event tournament near its HQ in Little Rock, Arkansas and started to sponsor golfers.
“Right now I can point to five professional golfers that you would know every one of them who bank here and the loans that I have and the deposits they keep here pretty much cover what I'm spending,” says Holland. “I don't want to make this sound arrogant but there's no other banker in the United States who invests in golf like Malcolm Holland has.” He’s right. There isn’t.
This story originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Local Profile. To subscribe, click here.
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