CHARLOTTE -- In two weeks, Brian Moynihan will take on what is sure to be the toughest job of his career: running the nation's biggest bank.
He has a lot on his plate. As CEO of Bank of America, the former retail banking chief at the Charlotte-based bank will have to cool relations with regulators, overcome skeptics in Congress, handle investigations into the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch, restore fractured morale and deal with cultural divides between the bank's several centers of power.
So how does an Ohio-born lawyer who came to the bank as part of its 2004 purchase of FleetBoston do that?
One word: execute.
In an interview Thursday, Moynihan discussed some of the challenges left for him and the bank and how he expects to go about resolving them in the coming year.
"When we use the word execution, we mean key things that face our customers," Moynihan said. That includes rebuilding relationships with consumers who have had economic hardships, he said.
That's a big job for Bank of America, which has about 53 million relationships with customers, including individual consumers and businesses. That breadth helps make Bank of America particularly vulnerable to high unemployment, which remains at double-digit levels.
That can mean more losses on the bank's bread-and-butter business of making loans. Bank of America lost more than $2.2 billion in the third quarter as bad debt kept rising as consumers lost their jobs and struggled to pay their bills.
At the same time, Moynihan will have to juggle regulatory investigations into the bank's 2008 acquisition of Merrill Lynch while trying to repair relationships with regulators and members of Congress, who sharply criticized Lewis after the bank required billions in aid after acquiring Merrill.
"Bank of America isn't a broken mess," said Anton Schutz, portfolio manager of Burnham Financial Industries Fund and Burnham Financial Services Fund. "What Bank of America did is they paid too much for Merrill Lynch at the time, which created some issues."
Moynihan also needs to boost company morale, which was severely shaken when the financial crisis hit in 2007, and grew with controversy over the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch.
Moynihan said the bank's decision to pay back $45 billion in government loans on Dec. 8 was a major step in bringing back employee and shareholder confidence.
One other thing Moynihan has to accomplish is to integrate some of the bank's most recent acquisitions, including Merrill Lynch and mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp.
Moynihan will succeed Ken Lewis, who announced in September that he would retire at the end of the year, setting off a scramble to find a replacement.
At an event for several hundred bank employees in downtown Charlotte on Thursday, Lewis called Moynihan a humble, caring and intelligent leader.
