published Feb 26, 2018, 6:58:50 PM, by Laura J. Keller
(Bloomberg) —

Bank of America Corp. plans to open 500 branches across the U.S. during the next four years, including an expansion of its retail business into Ohio.

Consumer-banking services will be available in Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm said Monday in a statement. The bank plans to hire more than 5,400 workers as part of the expansion. It had 4,470 U.S. branches and a workforce of 209,000 at year-end.

The new centers focus on adding as many meeting spots as possible for clients to talk to staff about mortgages, retirement saving, small-business loans and other products, said Dean Athanasia, co-head of the firm’s consumer banking and small business operations.

“There’s less a need for a big, giant, grandiose lobby,” Athanasia said Monday in a phone interview. “We want to build it for our clients, not for us.”

Bank of America jumped ahead of Wells Fargo & Co. to become the U.S. bank with the second-largest deposit base in 2017, according to Federal Reserve data. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is first. Profit from Bank of America’s consumer division increased 14 percent to $8.2 billion last year, the second-largest advance among the firm’s four major segments.

Deploying Resources

The lender already offers commercial and business banking, as well as wealth management, in Ohio. The bank cut its U.S. branch count by more than 600 offices in the four years ended December 2017.

“We continue to deploy significant resources to meet the changing needs of an expanding client base,” Thong Nguyen, who co-heads the consumer unit with Athanasia, said in the statement.

Even with the new branches, Bank of America’s overall retail network could dip below its current count for a time, Athanasia said. That’s because Bank of America is continually weighing whether to close branches, based on factors such as proximity to other locations, nearby competition and lease considerations, he said.

“More often than not, we’ve closed branches where we had a lot of overlap, or they were in some locations where we didn’t have critical scale,” Athanasia said.

Customers using the bank’s technology services have also reduced the need for so many branches, Athanasia said. Apps now handle the deposit-taking volume of 1,200 financial centers, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura J. Keller in New York at lkeller22@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net Dan Reichl, Steven Crabill
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