(Updated, 11:30 a.m.)
NEW YORK – Bank of America Corp. is planning to close some of its more than 6,109 U.S. branches but has not yet decided how many will be shuttered, the bank’s top spokesman said today.
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“We don’t have a final plan for the ultimate number of branches,” said James Mahoney, head of corporate communications at the Charlotte, N.C.-based company, according to Bloomberg News. “Our vision is the network will be managed downward over time.”
Bank of America has 6,109 branches in 32 states, including dozens of ATMs and banking centers in Rhode Island and Bristol County, Mass., and holds 12.2 percent of all U.S. deposits, according to SNL Financial LLC.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis told investors last week the bank is planning to close about 600 of its branches in the U.S.
Mahoney said Lewis’s comments came in response to a questioner who asked if the bank could reduce the number of branches by 10 percent. The CEO said “it could be around that range,” according to Mahoney.
The newspaper said Lewis told investors about the plan in a meeting at Bank of America’s Charlotte, N.C., headquarters last Thursday. Another executive, Liam McGee, also said branch closures were being prepared, but said it was too early to guess about specific numbers, the paper said.
The Journal said Lewis and another executive, Liam McGee, did not offer a timeline for when the branch closings would occur. McGee told investors the branch closures were a response to changing consumer habits as more people switched to online and mobile banking.
Bank of America has been hit hard by the financial crisis, particularly after its troubled acquisitions of both Countrywide Financial Corp. and Merrill Lynch & Co. last year. The company’s loan losses also have been rising as jobless consumers are unable to repay their debts.
“It’s prudent to trim the branches by 5 or 10 percent every cycle,” Ken Thomas, a Miami-based banking consultant who analyzes branch locations, told Bloomberg. “Ken Lewis understands you really have to buckle down on cost cuts.”
Additional information is available at BankofAmerica.com.
