Awards for excellence: North America: USA

Euromoney Awards for Excellence 2006
USA
I Canada

The long and winding historical highway of the US financial services industry is littered with the dead bodies of institutions that tried to pursue a universal bank model but failed in the attempt. Citigroup, for instance, has long since begun the wholesale retreat from the full-service banking model it began more than a decade ago when Sandy Weill started to assemble a hodgepodge collection of goods and services to pack on the shelves of his one-stop-shopping financial hypermarket.

But in the face of conventional wisdom that firms should stick tightly to their knitting – retail banks to the consumer market and Wall Street houses to the capital markets – Bank of America has defied the odds. Starting back in 1998 with the completed merger of the old San Francisco-based Bank of America and Nations Bank, Bank of America has aggressively pursued a huge array of financial service products – from card operations and internet retail banking to corporate cash management, investment-grade debt issuance, leveraged finance and structured credit.