Bank of America 2000 Annual Report Download - page 6

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Recognized by Global
Finance magazine as one
of the “Best Retail Internet
Banks” in North America.
Named one of America’s top
companies for women’s
businesses by the Women’s
Business Enterprise
National Council.
CEO Hugh McColl received
Excelente Award for being
the “Most Supportive
Person of the Latin
American Community.”
throughout this report, shows that our strategy is working and that our primary growth
engines are gaining momentum in the marketplace.
The stock market, appropriately, continues to take a wait-and-see approach, even as
issues such as interest rates, credit quality and the slowing growth of the overall economy
present new challenges to strategic execution and make judgments about our long-term
earnings potential difficult. Despite these factors, I believe that our core businesses will
continue to grow and improve, and that, ultimately, the value they create will be
recognized by investors.
The Company We’ve Built In the midst of unmistakably difficult times, I remain
confident. There are good reasons for this confidence.
We are building this company with a clear vision of what we want to be for our
customers and clients. In short, we are building an organization that will provide greater
value, convenience, capability and expertise to more customers and clients than any other
company in the U.S. financial services industry. We may not want to be all things to all
people, but we do want to be the primary source of financial services to more people
and organizations than anyone else.
The major components necessary to turn this vision into reality are all in place.
We have the largest geographic retail banking franchise in the nation, with a leading
presence in all the country’s highest-growth markets. We do business with more than one
in three households within our franchise and more than 2 million U.S. businesses. Our
delivery network is unmatched, with more banking centers and ATMs than any competi-
tor, the busiest telephone banking call centers in the country and the largest Internet
banking customer base in the world. We offer a broad array of products and services,
enabling all our customers and clients – from individuals to corporations – to manage
their finances as a whole, easily and confidently. We have capital strength, visionary
leadership and more than 140,000 talented, dedicated associates working hard to accom-
plish shared goals.
With these pieces in place, we began the difficult task of pulling it all together and
making the machine run the way it was designed to run: not as a disjointed collection of
individual businesses, but as a unified whole that creates value for customers and clients.
This idea has everything to do with the articulation of our corporate strategy, which is to
integrate businesses, reward broad relationships and align resources effectively. Despite
the financial “noise” created by the factors cited above, the underlying evidence is that
the strategy is working.
For example, in our retail bank, a critical component of strategic execution is broad-
ening and deepening existing customer relationships. To reward customers for bringing
us more of their business, we are creating value packages that encourage customers to
expand their relationships with us from a single product up through several identified
multi-product service levels. The value proposition is quite simple: customers who hold
very few, basic Bank of America products – say, a checking account or a credit card –
are encouraged to consolidate their business with the bank, including savings and invest-
ments, brokerage services, auto or other consumer loans, mortgages or home equity