A San Francisco bank for “the little fellows”.

Bank of America began life under another name. English Wikipedia dates the opening of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco to 17 October 1904, and the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1994) names its founder as Amadeo Peter Giannini, an Italian immigrant who had built up a share of his stepfather’s produce business before turning to banking. According to the directory, Giannini had served as a director of a small San Francisco savings bank and left after failing to persuade its board that the working people arriving on the West Coast were good borrowers. He set out instead to found a bank for “people who had never used one”, with a credo of serving “the little fellows”, and opened it in a former tavern.

The directory says Giannini raised the bank’s capital by selling shares mostly to small investors, each of whom was limited in how many he or she could hold, and that although Giannini never held a dominant share of the stock, he ran the bank as though it were closely held. It describes his response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: before the bank’s building burned, he removed its cash, hid it in a wagon of oranges and kept it at his house, then resumed lending from a plank-and-barrel counter on the waterfront, urging the city to rebuild.

Branches followed. The directory records that in 1909 the Bank of Italy bought a struggling bank in San Jose and ran it as a branch, the start of a network that Giannini extended across California. Because state and federal rules limited branching, he grouped his banks under a holding company, BancItaly, and when California changed its law in 1927 he consolidated four banks into the Bank of America of California, the directory says. Wikipedia adds that a Los Angeles bank called Bank of America, set up in 1923 with Giannini as a minority investor, merged with the Bank of Italy in 1928.

In 1928 Giannini created a further holding company, Transamerica, whose name signalled his ambition to bank across the country. The directory says Transamerica bought the New York investment house Blair & Co. in 1929, and that in 1930 Giannini consolidated his two banking systems into the Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association. Wikipedia gives 3 November 1930 as the date the Bank of Italy took that name.

Proxy fight, BankAmericard and a holding company.

The name was settled, but control of it was not. The directory says Giannini handed the presidency to Elisha Walker of Blair & Co. in 1930 and went to Europe, then returned in 1931 on hearing that Walker was moving to break up Transamerica. A proxy fight followed in which Giannini held stockholder meetings in town halls, gymnasiums and courthouses across California, and the stockholders returned control of the bank to him. In the 1930s the bank introduced instalment lending under the name Timeplan, the directory records, covering cars, homes, appliances and personal credit.

Federal regulators pressed for years for Transamerica and the bank to be separated, and the directory says the Federal Reserve forced that separation in 1957. By then leadership had passed to Giannini’s son, Lawrence Mario Giannini, as president of Transamerica, and later to Clark Beise, who gave branch managers more responsibility for their own branches. In 1958, Wikipedia says, the bank introduced a credit card called BankAmericard, which was renamed Visa in 1977; the directory describes BankAmericard as the predecessor of Visa.

In 1968, the directory says, BankAmerica Corporation was created as a holding company for Bank of America N.T. & S.A. Chief executives that followed included A. W. “Tom” Clausen, who succeeded Rudy Peterson in 1971 and left in 1981 to head the World Bank, and Samuel Armacost, who replaced him. In 1992 BankAmerica merged with another California bank, Security Pacific Corporation.

The decisive change came from the east. On 14 April 1998 the International Herald Tribune, in a report by Mitchell Martin published on the New York Times website, said NationsBank of Charlotte had agreed to acquire BankAmerica Corp., and that the combined institution would keep the BankAmerica name. The paper said Hugh McColl, the NationsBank chief executive, would be chairman and keep his office in Charlotte, North Carolina, while BankAmerica’s chairman, David Coulter, would become president and stay in San Francisco. McColl said the aim was to be “America’s bank, at home and all around the world”. Wikipedia says NationsBank was the nominal survivor, that the holding company was renamed Bank of America Corporation, and that the two main banks were merged as Bank of America, N.A. McColl stepped down as chief executive in 2001 and named Ken Lewis as his successor, Wikipedia says; in 2004 the bank bought FleetBoston Financial, a deal the BBC reported when it was announced in October 2003.

Design and documentation.

Bank identity lives in a narrow set of places, and each one sets its own constraints. Exterior signage has to read from a moving car or across a street, so marks are usually reduced to a short name or initials, a single colour field and a simple geometric symbol that can be lit from behind or cut from metal. Inside a branch, the same identity is translated into carpet, wall graphics, counter fronts, queue barriers and printed leaflets, where a strong brand colour is often used as an accent rather than a full flood.

Payment cards bring a different discipline. The design has to share a small rectangle with a chip, a card-network mark, embossed or printed numbers and a contactless symbol, so the bank’s own mark is often pushed to a corner or set as a quiet pattern. App icons compress the system further still: a rounded square a few millimetres wide, where a monogram or symbol on a flat colour has to stand out on a crowded phone screen. Reading a bank brand well means following one mark through all four of these settings and noticing what changes and what is kept constant.

A borrowed national name, kept through every merger.

The Bank of America identity is, above all, a name, and the name has outlived several of the companies that carried it. Giannini’s bank started as the Bank of Italy, a name tied to the San Francisco community it served; by 1930 it had taken the far broader name of a Los Angeles bank it had absorbed. When NationsBank of Charlotte bought BankAmerica in 1998, the buyer gave up its own name and took the Californian one, so that today’s Bank of America Corporation is legally the successor of NationsBank while publicly carrying a name that began in California.

The mark that accompanied the name has changed with those owners. Wikipedia illustrates a logo it captions as used from 1969 to 1998, during the BankAmerica holding-company years, and another it captions as used from 1998 to 2018, the year of the NationsBank merger. Wikipedia gives the head office today as the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, a tower it says was completed in 1992, the home city of NationsBank.

The bank’s card history belongs to the same identity story. BankAmericard, introduced in 1958, carried the bank’s name, and Wikipedia records that the card was renamed Visa in 1977. The directory’s account of Giannini’s early years — the former tavern, the shares sold mostly to small investors, the plank-and-barrel counter after the earthquake — is the founding story it tells of the bank, and it quotes Giannini’s aim of serving “people who had never used one”.

For a design guide, Bank of America shows how a single name can be detached from the institution that coined it and carried, intact, through holding companies, a proxy fight and a cross-country merger, while the mark around it is redrawn for each new owner. Compare it with Wells Fargo, another bank founded in San Francisco, and Visa, the card network that began as BankAmericard. For this guide we use federal navy, signal red and teller white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bank of America’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.