Today's Bank of America is really NationsBank of Charlotte wearing a borrowed name
When NationsBank bought BankAmerica in 1998, the Charlotte bank was the buyer and the legal survivor. It kept its own headquarters, stock price history and chief executive, yet adopted the better-known Bank of America name, along with a federal charter first granted to a San Francisco immigrants' bank in 1927.
That San Francisco bank was the Bank of Italy, founded on 17 October 1904 by Amadeo Giannini to serve Italian immigrants who were being turned away or treated poorly elsewhere. It merged in 1928 with a Los Angeles lender called Bank of America and took that name in 1930. Giannini expanded aggressively; by 1929 his bank had 453 offices across California. He dreamed of a truly national bank and built a holding company, Transamerica, to push into other western states and insurance, until regulators forced the two apart under antitrust law in 1953.
One of its inventions now circles the globe. In 1958 the bank launched BankAmericard, a credit card linked directly to customers' accounts, and in 1977 it was renamed Visa. The bank itself had a bumpier ride: heavy losses on developing-country loans in 1986 and 1987, a record-setting takeover of Security Pacific in 1992, and then trouble after lending $1.4 billion to the investment firm D. E. Shaw, which was hurt by the 1998 Russian financial crisis. That weakness opened the door for NationsBank, which paid $62 billion in what was then the largest bank acquisition ever.
The eastern branch of the family tree is older still. Through its 2004 merger with FleetBoston, the bank traces a line back to the Massachusetts Bank, chartered in 1784 as the first federally chartered joint-stock bank in the United States. NationsBank itself grew from an 1874 Charlotte bank through a string of mergers across the South.
The combined company held $570 billion in assets and 4,800 branches in 1998, yet regulators demanded the sale of only 13 branches in New Mexico. It added Merrill Lynch during the 2008 financial crisis and now ranks second among American banks by assets, behind JPMorgan Chase.
Source: Bank of America
