With its share price bottoming out, Bank of America is in makeover mode, selling off investments and taking a big, warm $5 billion bath with Warren Buffett. Late yesterday, they joined Yahoo in announcing personnel changes, which one analyst called the “Tuesday-afternoon massacre,” saying farewell to two top executives, veteran Joe Price and the president of the wealth-management division Sallie Krawcheck, who DealBook passingly dubs “one of the top women on Wall Street.” The bank created two new COO spots, reporting directly to CEO Brian Moynihan, which “splits the sprawling empire into two main units, one focused on consumers, the other on businesses and institutions.”
The move is Moynihan’s second such managerial rearrangement this year, and Bloomberg reports that it could be a safety measure. “Moynihan knows he’s in the line of fire, he’ll do everything he can to save the bank,” said one source, “and if for some reason he’s gunned down, he knows he has to have an heir apparent.” That’s Thomas Montag, one of the new co-chief operating officers, who received $15.2 million in bonuses for running the company’s most profitable division. Since, B of A has posted a $8.8 billion quarterly loss and has seen its shares, which closed at $6.99 on Tuesday, fall nearly 50 percent since the start of the year.
BofA Shakeup May Put Montag in CEO Contention [Bloomberg]
Struggling Bank of America Shakes Up Its Top Management [DealBook/NYT]
