Word: banking
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...industry built on big talk and swagger, Bank of America's Kenneth Lewis is an anomaly. "I don't feel the need to be a dominant force through talking first or talking the most. That's not one of my needs," he tells me in an interview at the North Carolina bank's office in midtown Manhattan. "Listening can be a competitive advantage. Some people just...
...Some analysts have speculated that the deal conveniently earns BofA the political goodwill it will need if it ever wants to expand its consumer-banking business. (The bank already holds close to the federal limit of 10% of the nation's deposits.) Lewis says his motivation is much more straightforward: to complete his vision of a truly national bank serving every financial need that any American might have, by adding the one missing piece - mortgages...
...would be a mistake, however, to construe his banking strategy as public service. Lewis may have been born in Mississippi and raised in Georgia, but he grew up at NationsBank. It is, essentially, the only full-time employer he has ever had, and he has spent the past 38 years of his life singularly dedicated to the mission set out by his equally determined mentor, Hugh McColl, to transform that North Carolina institution into what would become Bank of America...
...McColl and his two predecessors laid the groundwork, challenging interstate banking regulations to expand into a regional powerhouse in the Southeast and then on the West Coast, where it captured BofA in 1998 and hauled the name back to Charlotte. Since Lewis became CEO in 2001, the bank's reach has exploded in every direction. BofA is now No. 1 in deposits (with the $47 billion purchase of FleetBoston Bank), No. 1 in credit cards ($35 billion for MBNA) and No. 1 in wealth management ($3.3 billion for U.S. Trust), and with the Countrywide deal, it will soon...
...really the climax of a 30-year saga of grand ambition. What next? "The only way to really succeed," Lewis says, "is to find beauty and excitement in organic growth." For BofA, that means getting credit-card holders to open checking accounts and turning mortgage borrowers into private-banking clients. It's the same strategy that Citi has pursued without much success, but Lewis says his bank is focused on just one country, the U.S. "That's a big advantage and a big difference," he says...