Bank of America

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Bank of America (BofA) is a Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank holding company founded in 1874 that trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "BAC."

Table of contents

1 Corporate timeline

1.1 1874
1.2 1957
1.3 1960
1.4 1982
1.5 1988
1.6 1991
1.7 1996
1.8 1997
1.9 1998

1.9.1 History of San Francisco's Bank of America

1.10 2004

2 See Also

Corporate timeline

1982

NCNB buys Lake City, Florida-based First National Bank of Lake City, its first interstate expansion.

1988

NCNB assets swell to $60 billion after it buys failed First RepublicBank of Dallas, Texas from the FDIC. Corporate name changes to NCNB Corporation.

1991

NCNB name changes to NationsBank after acquisition of Atlanta, Georgia-based C&S/Sovran Corp. Assets grow to $118 billion.

1996

NationsBank acquires Saint Louis, Missouri-based Boatmen's Bancshares for $9.6 billion. The combined bank becomes the largest in the American South with assets of $225 billion with 2,600 branches stretching from North Carolina to New Mexico.

1997

NationsBank aquires Florida's largest bank, Jacksonville-based Barnett Banks for $15.5 billion. The combined bank has assets of $284 billion.

1998

NationsBank changes its name to Bank of America after acquring the better-known San Francisco, California-based BankAmerica Corp. for $64.8 billion to create a banking giant with combined assets of $570 billion with 4,800 branches in 22 states.

History of San Francisco's Bank of America

BofA 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.

2004

Bank of America acquires Boston, Massachusetts-based FleetBoston for $47 billion to become the second-largest bank in the United states with assets of $966 billion with 5,700 braches 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.