Now one of the leading banks in America, Bank of America is continually proving to provide a service that surpasses most others. With a unique history in merging and acquiring, Bank of America is now number nine on the Fortune 500.
Bank of America History
Before the merger of 1998, Bank of America was two separate entities, NationsBank, and BankAmerica. BankAmerica was started in 1904 in San Francisco by Amadeo Giannini, and was then called the American Bank of Italy. Giannini's success came from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire that wiped out much of the city. Giannini was able to save all of the deposits, and thus unlike many banks, had money to lend when the costly reconstruction began.
In 1929 the Bank of Italy merged with the Los Angeles based Bank of America in part due to their advanced bank branching system. The combined company was headed by Giannini and held the name Bank of America. By the outbreak of WWII, Bank of America through aggressive progression of their branch-banking concept had become the largest bank in California.
After WWII, California became the nations fastest growing state, as well as that with the highest use of checking accounts. To accommodate the influx of transactions, the bank invested heavily into information technology, and is generally credited with inventing modern centralized bank operations, along with a number of financial transaction processing technologies such as automatic check processing, account numbers and magnetic inc character recognition. These technologies also allowed credit cards to be linked to private accounts, and in 1958, the bank created the BankAmericard, which changed its name to VISA in 1977. Because of the efficiency of these technologies, Bank of America was able to g ...