How good is BofA’s Ken Lewis at integrating acquisitions?

Peter Scaturro knows private banking. And when Nationsbank

Bank of America bought the company he ran, US Trust, they thought they were

buying his private-banking expertise at the same time. Think JP Morgan buying

Bank One for Jamie Dimon, or Apple buying NeXT for Steve

Jobs.

BofA didn’t want Scaturro to run the whole bank, but they did want him to run

the private-banking operations. That would actually mean a huge rise in the

total assets under management that Scaturro was responsible for: US Trust had

a perfectly respectable $93 million, but the private-banking arm of Bank of

America had $172 billion, bringing the total up to $265 billion – more

than the leading US private bank, JP Morgan, and vastly more than Citi’s private

bank, which is being run this week by Sallie Krawcheck.

But, it was not to be. Scaturro’s

now resigned, even before he formally took on his new job. The WSJ has all

the gory details: in a nutshell, Scaturro was going to be running the new

private bank in name, but not in fact. The real boss was going to be

Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s president of Global Wealth and Investment

Management, who clashed with Scaturro on everything from ATM fees to computer

systems.

Moynihan comes a the BofA culture of economies of scale, while Scaturro was

much more comfortable giving highly personalized – and very expensive

– service to billionaires:

Bank of America executives, steeped in a more middle-America culture, also

looked askance at U.S. Trust’s lavish New York headquarters, according to

people familiar with U.S. Trust’s side of the deal…

Mr. Moynihan’s mantra is "scale": Mechanization and a one-size-fits-all

product suite has made Bank of America excel in such areas as branch and business

banking, where products are commodities and where "customer delight"

scores are scrutinized.

Mr. Scaturro, by contrast, preaches "specialized service" to millionaire

and billionaire clients who demand constant attention and performance. The

company’s marketing events include intimate dinners for clients with top authors

or politicians, private concerts and cocktail parties at its Manhattan townhouse.

Mr. Moynihan, according to people familiar with meetings held to orchestrate

the banks’ integration, viewed some of U.S. Trust’s marketing events as overly

costly and ineffective.

Bank of America, and its predecessor NationsBank, has been among the most

aggressive at categorizing its "rich" clients — from super-rich

down to merely rich — and tailoring services along those lines, which has

meant some people accustomed to personal bankers end up steered to toll-free

phone numbers for service.

During one integration meeting, Mr. Moynihan’s team even suggested charging

ATM fees to U.S. Trust clients — seen as the ultimate insult to pampered

customers who entrust millions to their advisers.

The story here will be familiar to anybody in an institution bought by Nationsbank

or Bank of America, including many on the investment-banking side of the BofA

of old. The Charlotte executives love to make acquisitions of operations where

they’re weak, but then they have a habit of imposing their own systems on the

new company, despite the fact that they bought the new company precisely because

its own systems were better. (It’s worth remembering that BofA’s current private-banking

portfolio wasn’t grown organically: it, too, was bought in, through acquisitions

such as that of FleetBoston.)

BofA CEO Kenneth Lewis says that his main job right now is

digesting all the acquisitions that his company has made in recent years. But

this latest news seems to indicate that BofA is still refusing to adjust to

new cultures, and is still insisting on imposing its own methods on everyone

and everything it has bought. Which is unlikely to make the integration process

any easier. As the WSJ notes,

Bank of America reached its unprecedented size through more than 20 acquisitions

during the 1980s and 1990s. As the bank scurried from one deal to the next,

it hemorrhaged customers of companies it had paid dearly to acquire.

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