Bank of America is one of the few US banks that can claim to be genuinely national. Diverse businesses, healthily balanced between fees and net interest income, generated total revenues surpassing $100 million last year, and it wins Euromoney’s award as best bank in North America.
This is not a small company struggling to gain scale efficiencies.
However, one of the biggest elements that differentiates Bank of America is its long-standing commitment to local leadership in communities up and down the country. That includes a physical network of around 3,700 financial centres, as it terms the modern and more specialised concept of a branch.
This network continues to expand in pockets of the US where the firm and its predecessor banks were less active. Recent expansion of financial centres has targeted Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Omaha and Kentucky as well as cities like New Orleans and Pittsburgh. By 2027, it aims to be present in 90 of the top 100 markets in the US, implying 150 new financial centres.
These expansions evidently reflect a strategy to combine both digital and physical channels. Digital sales in a local area will typically rise by around 50% in the year after it opens a financial centre there, notes Holly O’Neill, executive committee member and president of consumer, retail and preferred, the bank’s biggest business division by revenue.
“The consumer is even more apt to buy digitally if they see there’s a physical location in the community,” O’Neill says.
Financially, the strategy is paying off. The group posted net income rising to $27.1 billion in 2024, marking up healthy growth in loans and deposits. Checking accounts have grown for 24 consecutive quarters, with 1.1 million new checking accounts opened in 2024. Global investment banking fees increased 31% to $6.2 billion. Markets revenues reached $18.8 billion, up 8% over 2023 and capping 11 consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth in sales and trading revenue.
Within the US, almost 100 local business presidents are the face of the firm to its clients and other stakeholders in states and cities across the country, bringing wider group capabilities to bear.
“Our regional presidents drive engagement across our businesses, from consumers to small businesses, to business banking and the investment bank,” says O’Neill. “That local market framework makes this big, national, and global company local. It’s a unique component of how we deliver the franchise to the local market, both from a community perspective, but also from a business perspective.”
One of the biggest elements that differentiates Bank of America is its long-standing commitment to local leadership in communities up and down the country
The firm’s employee banking & investing is one of the many ways in which the group’s different divisions work together, both locally and nationally – in this case, marrying its consumer banking and wealth management capabilities with its corporate and commercial client base. The EBI programme added 180 companies and their 1.3 million eligible employees in 2024, reaching 623 participating firms with 5.3 million eligible employees in total.
The group’s wealth management platform, Merrill, added more than 20,600 net new relationships and recorded around $68 billion in fee-based assets under management flows in 2024. A record 62% of Merrill clients had a Bank of America banking or lending account.
According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the firm is the US’s biggest lender to small businesses. And among the bigger mid-market clients that lie in the global commercial bank, it recorded strong deposit and loan growth as well as 48% growth in investment banking fees, boasting the number one share in this segment.
It launched CashPro Insights, a digital tool analysing information flowing through the treasury platform and giving personal insights to customers. Other innovations included enhancements to CashPro Chat, reusing technology from AI-powered assistant Erica.
“Some of our clients have been with the bank for decades, even centuries, but we’re not taking that lightly,” says Wendy Stewart, president of global commercial banking. “Client experience is at the core, and we continue to innovate. We have a good market share, but also opportunity to further grow.”
The emphasis on experience is a point that O’Neill also references – whether it’s at the branch level or in the app, where it counts 50 billion interactions a year. The way the bank monitors and measures customer experience is vital in this regard. It recently passed the milestone of 100 million pieces of feedback in its Voices customer survey programme.
“We’ve got to get the client experience right, whether our clients are engaging with us at an ATM, in our digital properties or in a financial centre,” O’Neill says. “This is foundational to what we do, every day.”
