Bank of America
Bank of America (BofA) is the second-largest bank in the United States of America. It is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "BAC."
History
Bank of America was formed by the merger of NationsBank and BankAmerica in 1998.
History of NationsBank
Commercial National Bank (CNB), the earliest forerunner of today's Bank of America, opened for business in Charlotte in 1874.
In 1957, CNB's total assets climbed to $234 million after the company acquired Charlotte-based American Trust Company, forming American Commercial Bank (ACB). ACB changed its name to North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) in 1960 after acquiring of Charlotte-based Security National Bank.
NCNB expanded beyond North Carolina for the first time in 1982, when it purchased Lake City, Florida-based First National Bank of Lake City, its first interstate expansion. Hugh McColl becames CEO of NCNB the following year.
In 1988, NCNB's assets grew to $60 billion ($60,000,000,000) after it bought the failed First RepublicBank of Dallas, Texas from the FDIC. NCNB's name was subsequently changed to NCNB Corporation.
NCNB became NationsBank in 1991 after acquiring Atlanta, Georgia-based C&S/Sovran Corp. NationsBank's assets grew to $118 billion following the merger.
In 1996, NationsBank acquired Saint Louis, Missouri-based Boatmen's Bancshares for $9.6 billion. The combined bank became the largest in the American South, with assets of $225 billion, and 2,600 branches stretching from North Carolina to New Mexico.
The following year, NationsBank acquired Florida's largest bank, Jacksonville-based Barnett Bank, for $15.5 billion, growing the company's total assets to $284 billion.
History of BankAmerica
BankAmerica was founded in San Francisco in 1904 by Amedeo Giannini as the Bank of Italy. Intended to be a bank for individuals and small business, the bank expanded and was the largest bank in California by 1950.
California was the fastest growing state at this time, with the highest use of checking accounts (partially driven by many soldiers being paid via bank accounts during WWII) resulting in BofA being swamped by checks. By 1949 the branches had to close at 2:00pm in order to process the bookkeeping by 5. To cope with the transaction volume, the bank invested heavily in information technology and is generally credited, together with GE and SRI, with inventing modern centralized bank operations in the form of ERMA, with a number of financial transaction processing technologies such as automatic check processing, account numbers, Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and, based on these technologies, credit cards linked directly to individual bank accounts. Because of the efficiency of these technologies, the bank had significantly lower administrative costs than other banks and was able to expand further, until it was the world's largest bank in the early 1970s. Its credit card, the BankAmericard, was the predecessor of today's VISA.
Post-merger history of Bank of America
Following the $64.8 billion ($64,800,000,000) acquisition of BankAmerica by NationsBank, Bank of America had combined assets of $570 billion, and 4,800 branches in 22 states.
In 2001, Bank of America CEO and chairman Hugh McColl stepped down and named Ken Lewis as his successor. Lewis's greater focus on financial discipline and efficiency contrasted greatly with the expansionary mergers and acquisition strategy of his predecessor.
In 2004, Bank of America acquired Boston, Massachusetts-based FleetBoston for $47 billion to become the second-largest bank in the United States with assets of $966 billion, and 5,700 branches serving 35 million customers in 29 states. After the merger with FleetBoston Financial, roughly 1 out of every 10 dollars in a bank were processed by Bank of America.
See also
