“Our associates are working with teammates across the company to create new opportunities to deliver the full power of Bank of America to our customers.”
Kenneth D. Lewis
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President
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To our shareholders:
Two great tasks defined your company’s efforts in 2004. First, we accelerated the execution of our organic growth strategy, creating value for shareholders by building and expanding millions of customer and client relationships across the country. Second, we acquired and began to integrate the operations of FleetBoston Financial Corporation, adding more than 6 million customers and greatly increasing our opportunities for value creation and future growth in a single stroke.
Some observers outside the company saw strategic conflict or a kind of corporate ambivalence in these two tasks. We do not.
In fact, we view our acquisition of Fleet as tightly connected to our ongoing commitment to organic growth. We said from the moment our two companies came together that our goal was not just to reduce costs, but to accelerate organic growth in the Northeast. And that’s just what we have done.
At the same time, the momentum we have been building for several years with our customers throughout the company continued to grow. In our retail banking operations, continuing improvements to products, services and the banking center experience are driving customer “delight” and revenue to all-time highs. In our wholesale banking businesses, bankers are working together to bring a full range of investment banking products and services to more of our clients than ever before. In our wealth management business, we are expanding our financial advisor network and increasing market share across the nation’s best and fastest-growing wealth markets.
While our associates are working within their lines of business to build customer relationships, they also are reaching out to work with teammates across the company to create new opportunities to deliver the full power of Bank of America to our customers. For example, investment bankers are working with commercial bankers to provide M&A advice to middle-market CEOs. Personal financial advisors are working with teammates across the bank to help us serve more of our consumer, small business, commercial and corporate customers with wealth management services.
And last year, we launched an initiative called the Fixed Income Strategies Group that enables our Global Capital Markets and Investment Banking business to distribute fixed-income products through Global Wealth and Investment Management’s network of financial advisors serving high-net-worth and retail clients, expanding the suite of product offerings available to our clients.
All this work is creating strong, consistent financial performance for our shareholders.
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