ABSTRACT
Take two big banks, mix them carefully together, and, with theright ingredients, create one giant. That single entity, the Bankof America, formed in 1998 with the merger of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Nation’s Bank and San Francisco-based Bank of America, is, at this writing, the largest geographic retail banking franchise in the United States. The combined organization employs 140,000 associates (the bank’s term for employees) and by 2000 had become the largest geographic retail banking franchise in the nation, doing business with more than one in three U.S. households in the 23 states in which it operates, and with more than 2 million U.S. businesses.
