BANK OF AMERICA CORP /DE/

The Bank of America Corporation can be traced back to the late 1800s with the Bank of Italy in San Francisco. In 1928, Armadeo Giannini’s Bank of Italy would be merged with the Bank of America to create one of the largest banks in the country. The newly merged bank would continue to expand in California for the next three decades, adding new technologies such as BankAmericard that allowed credit cards to be directly connected to bank accounts. By the 1960s, Bank of America would expand its operations, gaining an international presence. During that time, it also focused on becoming a “department store of finance,” marking a period of great innovations as the bank strove to make its range of products and services as wide as possible. In 1968, the BankAmerica Corporation was created as a holding company. By that decade the company had already created the largest bank in the world. However, as the 1980s came, many of its loans went bad and its stocks plummeted. It would not be until the end of the decade that the bank would restructure its operations and become profitable again. When Bank of America did recover, it went heavily expanded its operations, opening new branches in various states and merging with Security Pacific Corp. in 1992, amongst other companies. In 1998, the bank would merge with NationsBank to become the Bank of America it is now known as. Today the company has over $2 trillion in total assets, offering an extremely diverse array of products and services under the many subsidiaries it acts under with divisions such as Consumer & Business Banking, Global Banking, Global Markets, and Legacy Assets and Servicing, amongst others. It now has branches in all 50 of the states with many other centers worldwide, creating a network that utilizes over 5000 banking centers and online and mobile platforms to serve its clients.