Kenneth D. Lewis went shopping over the weekend and made a really big purchase.
Lewis, the CEO, president and chairman of Bank of America Corp., committed his company to buy Merrill Lynch & Co., the struggling investment banker and financial management giant.
“Ken Lewis always likes to buy the biggest thing he can,” analyst Nancy Bush told The Wall Street Journal. “So why not this? You are master of the universe, basically.”
The purchase of Merrill Lynch follows Bank of America’s acquisition of Countrywide Financial Corp. earlier this year.
Kenneth D. Lewis
Lewis took over as Bank of America’s CEO in 2001 following the retirement of Hugh L. McColl Jr., the executive who oversaw the acquisition of BankAmerica by NationsBank in 1998 and the creation of Bank of America.
Since then, Bank of America has continued to grow by acquisition. It purchased FleetBoston Financial Corp. in 2004 and MBNA, the credit-card firm, in 2005. In 2007, Bank of America bought LaSalle Bank in Chicago.
The acquisition of Merrill Lynch adds the largest group of stockbrokers in the nation to the work force of what is already the nation’s largest commercial bank.
Analysts warn that merging the two cultures may be difficult, but Lewis has a long history of bringing different companies under one umbrella.
A native of Mississippi, Lewis, 61, spent most of his childhood in Georgia. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother, a nurse, raised him.
“At a very early age, I realized that incrementally I was not going to be able to do things I really wanted to do unless I went out and made some money, because obviously we didn’t have a lot with my mother essentially raising us and not making a lot of money as an RN,” Lewis related in an oral history in 2004.
Consequently, Lewis had a series of jobs. He sold Christmas cards, delivered papers and worked in a gas station. During his senior year in high school he sold shoes.
Lewis graduated from Georgia State University in Atlanta. Years later, he gave $2.5 million to the university’s school of nursing, which was renamed the Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing in honor of his mother.
After graduation, Lewis took a job as a credit analyst with North Carolina National Bank, the company that became NCNB and then NationsBank before its merger with BankAmerica.
He came into banking at a time when first statewide and then nationwide expansion accelerated, and he was part of a series of acquisitions by his company.
As a banker, Lewis has stressed customer service. Asked once to select key achievements, Lewis said that one was being part of making “banking much more convenient (and) less expensive.”
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