Bank of America's Next Chief May Be Based in New York (Correct)
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. broadened itssearch for a chief executive officer to include candidates whowant to live in New York, acknowledging the bank’s biggest unitsare no longer based in its home of Charlotte, North Carolina,people familiar with the matter said.
The board, led by Chairman Walter Massey, is also concernedthere may not be a deep enough pool of qualified candidateswilling to move to Charlotte, 330 miles south of Washington, thepeople said, speaking anonymously because the search is private.CEO Kenneth Lewis, who is stepping down at year’s end, has saidCharlotte will remain headquarters as long as he’s in charge.
“It does reflect well on the board that they’re not goingto let the headquarters location limit their selection in termsof CEOs,” said Thomas Brown, CEO of New York-based hedge fundSecond Curve Capital. “There aren’t too many people around theworld who think that Charlotte is a major financial center.”
Five board members with ties to Charlotte have stepped downduring the past two years, and none of their replacements livesin the city, the state’s largest. New directors live in Alabama,Delaware, New York, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Lewis, 62, is theonly North Carolina resident.
Curl, Moynihan
The leading internal CEO candidates are Chief Risk OfficerGregory Curl, 61, who lives in Charlotte, and consumer-bankingchief Brian Moynihan, who almost left the bank last year afterhe declined to take a new post in Wilmington, Delaware,according to a person familiar with the situation. Moynihan, 50,lives in Boston, where he worked for FleetBoston Financial Corp.until Lewis bought the lender in 2004.
“We aren’t going to comment on speculation on theprocess,” bank spokesman Jerry Dubrowski said.
Former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. told a Charlottegroup on Oct. 22 that it’s unclear whether the next CEO will bebased in the city, according to four people who heard hiscomments at the meeting, which was sponsored by QueensUniversity of Charlotte. McColl engineered the 1998 acquisitionof San Francisco-based BankAmerica Corp., stipulatingCharlotte’s role as headquarters. He emphasized that he nolonger influences the board’s decision-making, according to thepeople who heard his comments.
McColl didn’t return telephone calls seeking comment.
The Finger family in Houston, owners of more than 1 millionBank of America shares, said in a regulatory filing today thatMoynihan and Curl aren’t suitable candidates and provided a listof 18 alternative choices. Their suggestions include former Bankof America executives Alvaro de Molina, now the CEO of GMACInc., and James Hance, chairman of Sprint Nextel Co. The Fingerssponsored a campaign earlier this year to oust Lewis.
Calabasas, Wilmington
Bank of America’s investment banking and wealth-managementbusinesses, which are run from New York, made up half of revenuethrough Sept. 30, up from 34 percent in the same period lastyear, before the acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co.
“With Merrill Lynch being such a big part of the ballgame, the CEO probably ought to be in New York,” said ArnoldDanielson, chairman of Danielson & Associates, an investment-banking firm in Bethesda, Maryland.
The home loans and insurance unit, which account for 14percent of revenue, is based in the former Calabasas, Californiaheadquarters of Countrywide Financial Corp., which the bankacquired in 2008. The credit-card services unit makes up 23percent of revenue and is based in Wilmington.
The consumer-banking business under Moynihan in Boston madeup 11 percent of revenue. All told, that means about 98 percentof the bank’s revenue comes from units headed by executivesbased outside Charlotte.
Charlotte Jobs
Massey leads a search committee of six directors, three ofwhom joined the board upon the FleetBoston acquisition. Theyinclude retired FleetBoston CEO Charles “Chad” Gifford, wholives in Boston.
“Some of the Fleet members have no allegiance toCharlotte,” Brown said.
The North Carolina city was home to two of the four biggestU.S. banks until San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. boughtCharlotte-based Wachovia Corp. in an October 2008 sale brokeredby government regulators.
Bank of America employs 15,000 people in its hometown, saidBob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber, a group thatpromotes local business interests. That’s about 5 percent of thebank’s global workforce of 281,863. Wells Fargo has about 19,000employees in the city after cutting about 2,000 jobs thereduring the past year, Morgan said.
New Yorkers contacted about the job include Charles Scharf,retail banking head at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., aperson familiar with the matter said. Robert Kelly, CEO of Bankof New York Mellon Corp. and a former Wachovia chief financialofficer, “has said he has no interest in the job,” spokesmanKevin Heine said today.
A JPMorgan spokesman, Thomas Kelly, declined to comment onbehalf of Scharf.
To contact the reporters on this story:David Mildenberg in Charlotte at dmildenberg@bloomberg.net;Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 3, 2009 15:29 ESTSource: Bloomberg
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