- Business Insider is mapping out the power structure in the global banking and markets businesses overseen by Bank of America Merrill Lynch Chief Operating Officer Tom Montag — one of the most powerful executives on Wall Street.
- We’ve identified 40 of the most powerful people in the bank’s new-look corporate and investment bank, which has been surging in 2019 after a leadership overhaul.
- Business Insider spoke with insiders, ex-employees, consultants, and other industry experts for this project.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
At a financial conference in September, Tom Montag, the chief operating officer at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, spent the bulk of his time on stage shedding light on the comeback story of the year at his firm — the resurgence of its investment-banking business.
About a year earlier, Montag, who oversees global banking and markets at Bank of America, began executing an overhaul of the firm’s corporate and investment bank, which in 2018 saw revenues and league-table market share take a nosedive.
Christian Meissner, the division’s chief, departed after an eight-year run as the firm reckoned with the struggles, and other execs, including Diego De Giorgi, his top deputy, followed him out the door in the ensuing months as well.
Montag promoted Matthew Koder as Meissner’s replacement, and the duo set out to work on reviving the business.
The strategy has included chasing more middle-market deal fees in previously overlooked regional locales, in part by tapping into the firm’s existing advantages from its vast wealth-management and commercial-banking footprint.
It has also included hiring a slew of talented bankers from the outside.
It’s hard to argue with the results: During the third quarter of 2019, the bank earned investment-banking advisory fees of $427 million, up 80% from the firm’s woeful third quarter last year. Through the first nine months, advisory fees increased 26% to just shy of $1 billion.
Meanwhile, on the league tables for the US — the epicenter of the firm’s struggles last year — Bank of America rebounded to fourth from eighth in mergers-and-acquisitions fees and climbed to third from fourth in overall US investment-banking fees, according to Dealogic.
Business Insider has been mapping out the power structure in the global-banking and markets businesses Montag oversees. We’ve highlighted top leaders in the bank’s $8 billion bond-trading unit and its equities-sales and trading division.
The corporate- and investment-banking overhaul, and the associated hiring blitz, has ushered in fresh faces into top roles.
Business Insider spoke with insiders, ex-employees, consultants, and other industry experts to gain insight into the reporting structure within the new-look division. We’ve focused on front-office execs that bear the primary responsibility for driving the group’s revenue — no back-office roles appear in our chart.
Read on to check out our organizational chart featuring 40 of the most powerful people leading Bank of America’s surging corporate and investment bank.
To see more leaders within a particular group, click the “division leadership” buttons.
Have more information about the organizational structure within Bank of America Merrill Lynch? Contact the reporter at [email protected] or via encrypted chat with Signal or Telegram.
