This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Westin, bringing you stories of capitalism. This week, David Gura takes us through the state of the world as investors look forward to the New Year, and we learn how generative AI could be used to give us healthy snacks that are just as tasty as the unhealthy kind. But we begin with a story about tenure — not the kind that guarantees you a job, but the kind that you have to earn day after day and year after year, the kind that looking back after 15 years may look obvious, but that at the beginning was anything but.
You know, I never really thought about it. I knew I had to be here a substantial time to work with the team and drive the company where it could be. But it never was — I could do this job five years.
The place was definitely not in great condition when Brian Moynihan took over as CEO of Bank of America on January 1st, 2010. It had just gone through a series of mergers, including the one that brought Moynihan to the bank through its acquisition of Fleet Boston just six years before.
Legacy Bank of America at that point probably had 100,000 employees, but then Merrill had 60,000 or so, Countrywide had 44,000. More people came from the outside than not. And so one of the things that the team and I had to settle down is what is the culture and what were the values.
Forming a single culture from such disparate parts would have been a challenge all by itself. But this all happened as the great financial crisis was in full bloom, putting enormous pressure on all the big banks. A year into his tenure, Moynihan faced a mountain of losses from the subprime mortgage business he had inherited when his predecessor, Ken Lewis, purchased Countrywide, leading to losses of over $30 billion. Its stock price had fallen nearly 10%. Its price to book value was down to .45, and the government was putting into place fundamental changes in the banking system overall, including upping the capital requirements for the banks — requirements some doubted Bank of America could meet. You have a lot of history. You also have a lot behind you. And when we think about what the banking world was, where Bank of America was in 2008 and 2010 when you took the job, it was a different world.
So a lot of people don't remember that in 2007 and 2006 is actually where the financial crisis started to come through. The property values started going down, the over-lending on the consumer side became exposed. The ripple effect through some of the CDOs and things like that, the impact on Bear Stearns and Lehman and Merrill and other companies and the acquisitions that took place. When you had those non-banks that were governed by different rules, the banking system was thrown into a much bigger group. That's what made it different coming out the other side, because suddenly the group of my peers were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP, Citi, ourselves, etc. It wasn't just the banks and the securities firms over here or the insurance firms over here. And that then required all the rules to change fast — the Volcker Amendment and stuff people hadn't thought about. And that was because suddenly you took all these people who were governed by different regimes, different rules, threw them in a pot and said, we're going to put a tent over all of it.
Moynihan's management team at the time knew that the challenges could make or break his new leadership, and Anne Finucane served as chief marketing and strategy officer at Bank of America in 2011 before becoming the vice chair of the bank and chair of its European operations.
This was a moment, if you will, in financial services. We were in a near recession that was the likes of which we had never seen before, and B of A had a million problems. We had issues with regulators. We had issues with analysts. We had issues with clients and customers. Elected officials were questioning our viability. And the stock price was very low and there were questions about the company in general. And this is what Brian Moynihan stepped into, and he stepped into it, I have to say, eyes wide open, because he had done almost every executive job in the company. So he was prepared. I think he was prepared in a way almost no one else could have been. And he was also willing and he was certainly able. So this was a moment for this company. And he assembled a crew around him, an executive management team, and we were going to work 24/7 for what turned out to be at least a few years, and we recovered to bring this bank back from the brink.
Moynihan focused on what was working, where it could win, and what it could do without, cutting billions in expenses and tens of thousands of jobs.
We got rid of $300 billion in assets, 50 operating businesses. We were down to a focused set of operating businesses. It made sense. We said, now we've got to grow. And so the first part of the response was growth, no excuses. But what you had in the base was these eight lines of business we talk about. We'd say you got to be top one, two, or three in a business. We were top one to three in all the business across those eight lines of business. But what you had is a lot of other stuff that was not as interesting. And then we had the regulatory issues and then we had the mortgage issue. So we just pushed all that away. But all those acquisitions left us with a franchise — as a top consumer banking franchise, the top wealth manager franchise, the top commercial banker in the United States, a global large corporate banker, and a global markets business — that we were able then to start to invest in growing them organically. We had to decide what we were going to do in terms of everything from customer care, employee morale, dealing with elected officials, dealing with regulators, and then what businesses we were going to lean in on and those that we were going to perhaps exit.
So Brian has a bit of the engineer in him in that he is an exacting person. We laid out every line of business. We laid out every geography we were in. When you look back on it, you can be a bit nostalgic, but at the moment it was very difficult and he was so determined. He's a very good leader because he's calm and he's thorough and he's also human. And what I mean by that is when everybody was kind of frazzled, we just kept at it. But there was a camaraderie around it that I think would be maybe unexpected.
Even as Moynihan and his team were rebuilding Bank of America from the ground up, concerns about the bank led others to make sure its problems didn't further risk the entire financial system, leading the government to insist Bank of America and the other money center banks take large infusions of cash investments, and even for mega investor Warren Buffett to pitch in with a $5 billion investment.
So in 2011, August, when the United States had been downgraded, was close to defaulting — the US was short and didn't have enough money, it was starting to run out of money — we were also getting knocked around. The same time, he came in August and said, 'Here's $5 billion. I know you don't need it, but it will stabilize.' And the 250,000-plus people we had at that time came to work the next day and said, 'The smartest investor put $5 billion in the company in 24 hours.' That was an interesting moment. At that point, we had actually recovered enough that we had sufficient capital. And by the way, he knew that. And in fact, that's what he said to Brian: 'I know. That's why I'm investing.' It helped us enormously with the analysts, community, and elected officials, and even our own employees. If Warren Buffett was investing in us, it was such a boost of confidence that we didn't maybe otherwise have at that point. So it was reputationally really beneficial.
Under Moynihan, Bank of America has not only survived, it has thrived, earning over $15 billion a year over each of the last ten years, increasing its assets from $2.3 trillion to $3.3 trillion, and its share price from $13 to $44. And that price-to-book ratio has gone from 0.45 to over 1.25. But even as it has come back strong, it has not grown as fast as its biggest rival, JPMorgan, whose share price has led the pack of the big banks, while Bank of America remains somewhere in the middle. Some have suggested that Moynihan's steadfast commitment to responsible growth may have held it back. Did you leave any money on the table because of the responsible part? And does responsible growth look the same today in 2025 as it did in 2010?
So one of the things we always talk to our teammates about is responsible growth was a call to growth, not a call to be responsible. We were already pretty responsible, I think, from 2010 to 2015. And the idea was that we'd done all the work, we reshaped the company. We said, now we've got to grow, and so that you never disrupt the company's ability to keep going. And we have businesses which offset each other. So the markets business has done well when the interest rate environment changed, now the consumer and global banking business will kick in. But the idea of responsible growth is that you've got to grow, no excuses, you've got to win in the marketplace. Responsible growth is like a dual thought, if you will — demonstrating responsibility, which is sort of an extension of good governance and also the contract you make with your clients and your employees that you're going to be responsible to them first and foremost all along the way. And remember now where we came from. And then the second thing was that we would grow. So responsible growth — growth can be a modifier to growth, but it's actually two thoughts. We will be responsible in all the ways that clients and regulators and the community would want you to be, and we will grow, maybe more conservatively than others. But I'd just repeat again, 25 years, we've had ten years of $15 billion-plus net income consistently.
What worries Bank of America today? Give us a sense of how you grade yourselves.
Well, we have great potential, but there's a phrase that Jim Collins, a great business writer, uses. And what I say is — so I get a lot of people ask me, I just had our market presidents on, you know, what about 15 years ago — what are you proud of? What'd you do? I said, it's a nice start, but what this company has ahead of us is a lot, because of what we've done for the last 200 years. But what we've done in the last 15 years, the team — you look forward to the next 15 years.
What do you think that may hold for Bank of America and what kind of person would need to lead it going forward as opposed to what's left in the past?
I think if you look ahead, the changes will come from the data, the technology, the ability to transmit that data, the compute power, the ability to imitate a human's thinking — those are ahead of us. That implication of voice recognition, computational power, algorithmic analysis, mathematical analysis combined with an understanding of humans — that can drive a whole another sea change in how we operate. And the person operating that has to be wise in that current, balanced, and aggressive.
That's the key, which is how do you push forward? As Moynihan positions Bank of America for the next 15 years, one of his priorities is to ensure that it is both a global bank and a local one, that it is thoroughly integrated into the communities it serves.
The whole idea was that we would set up a situation where you'd have top-line executives, but you'd also have market presidents. And the idea behind that was that market president would have a beat on that community, that economy, how we were going to contribute to it, and by the way, how we were going to get our fair share of business from that community.
So he's been very focused and he takes it all the way down to the community level to make sure that not only is the reputation good, but the numbers are good.
And that's where we turn next on Wall Street Week — to one of those communities Moynihan works to serve and a market president who illustrates what responsible growth means in practice. During his 15 years at the helm of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan has nurtured an alternative structure within the bank. One focused not just on its eight lines of business around the globe, but also on the individual communities it serves across the United States. That alternative structure is built around 97 regional presidents who add to their regular banking jobs specific local responsibilities.
It's all about serving the client. And when you think about Brian's tenure and his 15 years, he worked hard to build the culture of Bank of America. He wanted to simplify this organization. He helped us focus and have everything centered around the financial lives of our clients. So it sounds like common sense, but when you're an institution of our size with eight lines of business, that takes a lot of coordination and it takes that local understanding of the communities.
Jennifer Chandler is the Dallas market president, charged with focusing on her region, in addition to her job as head of Bank of America's Philanthropic Solutions team.
One of the things that we started — this was like 30 years ago. We started thinking about this question, which is: if we bought companies and pulled the corporate headquarters out of town, we pulled out the senior leadership too, because the company became a subsidiary and a part of a whole. And that became acute in the '80s when the acquisition started building up into the '90s. And so after that we said, how do we think about having our cake and eating it too? How can these national businesses, which are run nationally, not locally — wealth management business, consumer banking business, and middle market business — how do we knit them together? And so we started this idea of building the same kind of cooperation in the markets with a leader, a market president, who would replicate me in that market and replicate what used to be.
They've had market presidents for my full tenure here, as long as I can remember, at least in the 25 years. But I have seen it really improve under the leadership of Brian Moynihan. And as you know, he celebrated his 15-year anniversary as our CEO. So early on in my career it was more around the giving in the community, a check presentation, maybe some volunteerism. But under his leadership, it was far more about delivering this exceptional experience to our clients, to take this massive institution and make it feel more local. He was very thoughtful in that around who we had in those positions. It's quite the honor. The regional presidents system is key. There's a way to have the best of both worlds — all the capacity of a big money center bank together with the local connections of a regional bank.
How do you compete with regional banks? Because often regional banks would say that's exactly what they do. They're located there. They know they have all those client relations, personal relations with the society, with the culture. How do you compete with that?
So the way we think about it is we get our local locals and national nationals. So our team in the local market has the authorities to do things — credits up to $30, $40 million, all approved locally, no other approvals, even higher than that in some cases. So the idea is that's competitive locally. So we think about what the power of that team has that's managing locally, the personnel they have, and how they work together. And that's where, through the market presidents — through the 97 teammates we have to do this — they have scorecards to make sure the business is moving. Those line up with our line of business scorecards. And so the idea is to give them authority and power, and then advertising and charity money, all that — they replicate the president of a bank, and that's what they do.
You mentioned 97. How do you pick 97? Why isn't it 80 or 120? How do you pick where you need a regional presence?
Oh, we put it wherever we have a business. So we actually are in probably another 30 or 40 markets that are small that aren't as distinct. So we look at the MSAs and we said our goal in the company is to cover the entire population. By historical accident, for example, we didn't have anybody in Ohio, so we built out Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Dayton a little bit. We didn't have Louisville, Kentucky — just because there was never a bank acquired there. So we're building all these places, but it's all MSAs.
As Dallas Market President Chandler competes against regional banks, she also works with them. They all play an important role.
I love our regional banks. I'm dear friends with many of the CEOs around town, and it takes all of us. And I think they would tell you that it starts with understanding our clients. It is very localized, everything we do. So while we have 14,000 teammates and a very large presence here, every week I'm in a financial center, whether it's in the center of downtown or it's in a suburb, and I'm there as the doors open. And I will tell you, the person that our clients are walking in to see are people from the community there. So when you think about regional banks, know in their communities — when I can tell you I had a receptionist that just celebrated 57 years, I think that would reassure you that those clients know exactly who they're going to walk in and see. And those stories are not small. Our folks stay here. And whether it's fiduciary planning on the private wealth side, we helped write the fiduciary document with the estate planner — I wouldn't say one absolutely has that secured better than another. We think the regionals are very important for a lot of reasons, but I firmly believe with the approach we take and the approach of Bank of America, we understand our communities and we have very strong relationships with the clients we serve.
Dallas became a financial hub in the 1930s after the discovery of oil in East Texas and went on to become a manufacturing center during World War Two. With the tech boom of the 1990s, it has become part of what some people call the Silicon Prairie, supporting a diverse group of industries, including financial services. Charles Schwab announced that it was moving to Dallas from San Francisco in 2019. All of this has meant steady growth for the Dallas area, with a current population of nearly 8.5 million people, up from around 5 million in 2010 when Moynihan became CEO.
It is an exciting time, and I'm third-generation Dallasite, and so I've seen just the history of this community. We've always been a can-do city when you think about what we've done, and we were very forward-thinking many years ago, whether it was the railroad, DFW Airport. So we continue to think for the future and see what the needs of the community are. Why I raise that is that's what's worked to bring this diverse economy to North Texas. So examples include technology — well, Texas Instruments was here many years ago. So when we think about technology, that was for us the '60s, the '70s — so always being forward-thinking. Now that looks like biotech. Many people don't think of Dallas necessarily as a technology hub. They think of some other city here in Texas. Well, that's Dallas. And we're attracting the talent from the East Coast, from the West Coast. They're coming here. So it's diversity in every industry. Technology is a large one. We also see a large presence of global companies who either bring their headquarters here or they want to be sure, maybe have a population here or overseas. And I attribute that to, again, the great climate we have. We're centrally located. We're favorable when it relates to taxes, and it runs the gamut. Manufacturing, when you may or may not think of, the sports industry — we are number one when it relates to sports. And it's not just the usual suspects. We, of course, are the official bank of the Dallas Cowboys.
How do you know that's working? Or maybe more important, how do you know when it's not working?
We keep track of all the things that happen. There's metrics for every market we go through constantly. And they've been building on and building on. But how I really know what works is when I go into market and watch that team, and they tell me about what they've been doing together, what's on the volunteer side, whether it's on the retail side. And so they are always telling me that, and I don't rely on just what our statistics say. I rely on them also feeling good about it and what can we do. So when a natural disaster comes over western North Carolina, the market president there — as well as Augusta, Georgia, Florida — the people help us deploy in those markets. So sometimes it's the people who work branches and commercial bank. Sometimes it's the big operation center. And they basically lead our efforts in the forum to help bring those employees together. And so what you see is the success around all that. So it's not just business referrals — it actually gets into them leading the market and also helping us do what we do. So when the horrible floods came in western North Carolina, we found every teammate. We brought our Starlink branch up, we brought our ATMs up, we brought food in and water. But we're working through that market presence. What do you need in Augusta, Georgia? The same thing with our parishes down in Florida with the various markets. What do you need and what are you hearing? How do we connect for you so that we can — not only do we have national relief teams that are tremendous and are monitoring us and doing that — they do it through the eyes of local and how we can help them.
Chandler credits CEO Moynihan's leadership with avoiding the recent upheaval in regional banking in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse.
As we think about commercial real estate, we think about that example. It goes back to: if we had not had responsible growth — not six months before, not a year before — if we hadn't driven that for a decade before, would we have had far more challenges? Absolutely. But it wasn't only the commercial book. And if you look at our balance sheet, we're responsible in our lending, and we had smaller exposure on the deposit side of the balance sheet. If you look at the regionals and some of the others that had challenges, we weren't concentrated on the deposit side either. So it goes to client selection, making thoughtful decisions. But I'll tell you, in hindsight, thinking back a few years before where there were a few deals and opportunities we may have looked at that wanted to do at the time, that looked attractive — of course there were. But how did we feel going through that experience when we could not only insure our clients, but we were able to step up and help some of those other institutions that needed us at that time? So it takes some care and feeding that is important. I talked to the team — I just talked to them today. You know, I talk to them every month to make sure they give me input on what we can do. And then we advertise locally. We use their presence, their locations, their names appear in all the press. And so that when somebody says, 'I got a problem with Bank of America, I got an opportunity for Bank of America,' they know who to go to.
As Brian Moynihan looks forward to the next chapter for Bank of America, he emphasizes the history of the bank, its tradition of connections to the communities it serves, and above all, its connection to its clients and customers, driven by a team that's learned to pull together great businesses that have a common purpose.
To be great for the clients, those businesses, each other, the shareholders, and the communities they serve, and doing it in a way that, frankly, we're very proud of. Our customer delight scores are as high as they've ever been. Our teammates' scores — that's all good stuff. But it comes down to serving those customers and clients every day, and all that's worked. Where we have driven this company from here to someplace is kind of fun. And the next generation, after I'm gone, will take it and drive it even further.
Coming up, having your cake and eating it too — literally.
The promise of AI for healthy snack foods that taste just as good as the other kind. That's next on Wall Street Week. This is a story about having it all — our favorite snack food, our trim figure, our healthy body, and the health of the planet as well. All thanks to the wonders of generative AI. Or at least that's the plan. Why does the world need another snack food?
There are a lot of them out there. The world needs another snack food because the world needs a healthy snack food.
Indeed, a lot of healthy snack foods. Harold Schmitz spent decades at Mars, the company responsible for some of the most popular snacks in the world. He is now a founding partner of the venture capital firm, The March Group, targeting the $700 billion global snack market, putting artificial intelligence at the center of snack food companies like Rival's. What does artificial intelligence add to the recipe?
What it does is it actually makes this incredibly complex mixture of chemistry, biochemistry that then goes through food processing — it actually makes it understandable. So product development can happen exponentially faster in order to create exponentially better products that are more cost effective for consumers in the marketplace.
If Schmitz succeeds in making healthier snacks, it couldn't come at a better time. Studies show people continue to eat more snack food even as they struggle with weight gains that affect their health.
Consumers, for whatever reason, have less time for traditional meals as we think about them. And so snack foods play a really important role in filling these dietary occasions. At the same time, obesity is increasing at alarming rates. Are those two things connected? So it is quite possible they are connected. What we certainly know is that obesity is high and it has been increasing. And type 2 diabetes specifically, it's been called a global epidemic, is high and it has been increasing. It is really, really interesting that for the first time in history, thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, we actually see hints that this curve is bending downwards.
JPMorgan predicts that by 2030, 9% of the U.S. population — 30 million Americans — will be on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. When you talk about the GLP-1s, Wegovy or something, those are the things we know about. They do affect the demand, do they not? And that sounds like it wouldn't be good for somebody in the snack food business if people are eating less snacks.
Now, for the first time in human history, we actually have a class of pharmaceuticals that's relatively safe and it causes a decrease in food consumption. So in terms of demand, consumer demand will go down for certain types of foods that are less healthy. But consumer demand is going to go up for foods that are more healthy. And frankly, it's pretty clear from a business context that there's a gap in the marketplace for these healthy foods.
Seeking healthy foods to fill this gap in the marketplace became a quest for UC Davis computer science professor Elias Theotokis — not because it was his job, but because of his experience with his son, who had to drop out of school due to a debilitating condition. Doctors had no answers, so he looked at the food his son was eating.
We consulted with different nutritionists. We designed a diet, and within nine days my son was cured. And he's now 15. He never had this issue again. And I said, okay, I'm sold. That's it. Everything we do in Pippa is all about food.
Two-compass company Pippa targets uses of AI for food, working with a range of companies from the largest consumer packaged goods companies to startups like Rival's. The focus is on fiber and protein over savory snacks full of sugar, fat, and starch.
Food is something that is underserved in terms of why we are at the precipice of something really big. We have a need to change the paradigm and we have to be more sustainable going forward — for ourselves and for society. We need to generate food that can keep us healthy in the long term.
Does the food industry, particularly some of the large food companies that are very big, do they know they're on the brink of something really big?
They do. They have realized that, you know what? Maybe there's a reckoning that's coming.
If I am a food company and I want to develop a new food, what does AI allow me to do that I could not do otherwise?
Yeah, excellent question. So what it does is figuring out where we should focus. So imagine having all these variables, all these parameters — where do you start and what do you explore? Based on the velocity, you have your experiments, your formulations, doing a tasting. So what AI can do is accuity and certainly make you focus on what matters in the pursuit of the food industry's holy trinity: affordability, scalability, and taste.
Sorting through the billions of possible ingredient combinations and process parameters is hard enough without worrying about nutrition, let alone sustainability. But Rival's must also hit the mark on that familiar, satisfying crunch.
You can see that we got good browning in the center. You got real nice cell structure so that the texture is delicate.
Like Harold Schmitz, Ralph Jerome spent decades at the Mars company, including as head of its chocolate research and development arm. He's a co-founder of Rival's, and he showed us the business end of applying AI to food processing, all based around a machine called an extruder.
