Bank of America
Bank of America (BofA) was founded in San Francisco in the 1930s by Amedeo Giannini. Intended to be a bank for individuals and small business, the bank expanded and was the largest bank in California by 1950.California was the fastest growning state at this time, with the highest use of checking accounts (partially driven by many soldiers being paid via bank accounts during WWII) resulting in BofA being swamped by checks. By 1949 the branches had to close at 2:00pm in order to process the bookeeping by 5. To cope with the transaction volume, the bank invested heavily in information technology and is generally credited, together with GE and SRI, with inventing modern centralized bank operations in the form of ERMA, with a number of financial transaction processing technologies such as automatic check processing, account numbers, Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and, based on these technologies, credit cards linked directly to individual bank accounts.
Because of the efficiency of these technologies, the bank had significantly lower administrative costs than other banks and was able to expand further, until it was the world's largest bank in the early 1970s.
See Also:
- Bank of America Center (Houston)
- Bank of America Center (San Francisco)
- Bank of America Plaza (Atlanta)
- Bank of America Plaza (Dallas)
- Bank of America Tower
