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Charlotte’s top banking giants, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Truist, are charting growth based on efficiency, which includes cutting jobs, and the strategic adoption of artificial intelligence.
All three are coming from different strategic starting points as they leverage technology investments to drive long-term growth, bank executives said during presentations at investors conferences this week. Bank of America and Truist presented at BofA Securities Financial Services Conference in Miami and Wells Fargo at UBS Financial Services Conference in Key Biscayne, Florida.
Bank of America is coming from a foundation of consumer resilience, Wells Fargo from a period that saw the end of regulatory constraint and Truist has shifted to offense from its earlier post-merger phase.
Here’s what each bank is focusing on:
Bank of America optimistic on economy
Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan provided an optimistic outlook on the U.S. economy, driven by consumer resilience
The bank’s economic team forecasts U.S. GDP growth at 2.8% for the year, noting that estimates have been consistently raised over the past six to seven months, indicating momentum.
Despite concerns over a “K-shaped economy,” Moynihan pointed to consumers’ actions, not just their sentiment. A K-shaped economy means a recovery where different groups see different outcomes.
But Bank of America data show consumers in January spent 5% more year-over-year across all household incomes, Moynihan said. He also noted that economists project unemployment rate for the year will remain under 4.6%, with continued wage growth and declining interest rates.
He said stress tests indicate, even in a deep recession, would be less volatile than the 2007-2010 financial crisis.
Bank of America CEO on jobs and AI
Despite the bank’s significant growth and investment — including a planned 10% increase in technology development spending — Moynihan said the bank’s headcount has remained effectively flat since 2015.
But he also noted that the bank had 285,000 employees and peaking at 305,000 employees around 2010, but now has 213,000, down about 300 from the end of the year. Hiring and the replacement of jobs is carefully managed, Moynihan said.
“From the summer of ‘25 till now, before we hired the 2,000-plus kids out of schools, we’re flat head count, so we engineered 2,000 jobs out in four months,” Moynihan said.
“We built out in revenue-producing areas … so what AI does is give you a chance to work on areas,” Moynihan said. “We can engineer the head count back down so it allows you to attack places.”
He detailed how the bank does that by automating processes and redeploying thousands of people from back-office functions to revenue-generating roles, such as adding commercial and private bankers.
Bank of America views AI as a significant, yet evolutionary, tool. The bank plans to invest $10 billion in technology this year, emphasizing AI’s role in efficiency and customer service.
Bank of America’s proprietary AI tool, “Erica” serves 20 million users and handles the equivalent of 11,000 full-time employees’ daily work in customer and internal support.
“There has been a huge impact already in the industry and how it’s impacted capabilities, headcount, everything else,” Moynihan said.
AI also is being used to generate market reports, draft pitch books, and process complex internal tasks, like the 10 million data points required for regulatory reports. Moynihan emphasized that the success of AI is fundamentally tied to data quality.
The bank has spent about $3 billion over the last decade on data cleansing, noting, “Your data has to be perfect.”
Bank of America and the regulatory front
Addressing the topic of 10% credit card caps proposed by President Donald Trump, Moynihan said the bank has already taken steps to improve affordability.
Those moves include reducing overdraft fees, offering “no overdraft” accounts and providing a $500 short-term loan for a $5 fee to compete with high-cost payday options.
Wells Fargo has freedom to grow
Wells Fargo is actively pivoting from a period of regulatory constraint to a new phase of focused growth, a strategy enabled by the lifting of its $1.95 trillion asset cap. This restriction, a penalty for the 2016 fake accounts scandal, capped the bank’s growth for over seven years.
The bank is leveraging years of foundational investment to drive expansion across key businesses, Wells Fargo CFO Mike Santomassimo said.
The markets business was the segment “most constrained by the asset cap.” Initial growth has been concentrated in low-risk, high-quality collateral financing trades, which is expected to lead to broader client engagement and a build-out of other market-related activities over time, he said.
“A lot of where we’re seeing growth are the areas that we started investing in, four or five, six years ago,” he said.
Wells Fargo and lending
On the consumer side, the bank is seeing momentum in its newly re-platformed products, including credit cards and auto loans with a shift toward a “full spectrum lender” approach. This is coupled with the Volkswagen and Audi preferred financing partnership in the U.S.
The mortgage business, however, is not currently growing. Wells Fargo expects the decline seen over time to moderate and be relatively flat throughout the year.
Well’s Fargo, AI and jobs efficiency
Wells Fargo has reduced its headcount for about 21 consecutive quarters, Santomassimo said. That’s a significant decrease from its peak in 2020, down about 70,000 to 200,000 employees now. Based in San Francisco, Wells Fargo has its biggest employee base in Charlotte, with about 27,000 workers here.
“There’s still more to do to make things as efficient as they should be, and we’re focused on it,” he said.
Wells Fargo saved roughly $15 billion over the last five-plus years, with most of those savings reinvested into business-enabling technology, products and personnel.
Additional significant reductions are expected in non-personnel costs, including working down the bank’s real estate footprint.
Wells Fargo is preparing for the future role of AI. Most of the current year’s cost-cutting efforts do not rely heavily on AI. However, Santomassimo sees AI benefits increasing significantly in the coming years.
Truist shifts to tech and profitability
Truist Chief Financial Officer Mike Maguire outlined the bank’s strategic pivot toward accelerated earnings growth and improved profitability, providing a positive outlook on the bank’s momentum and addressing evolving risks like AI-driven disruption.
The technology is expected to “unlock a whole bunch of different opportunities,” he said.
Maguire described the bank’s strategy as an “offensive posture,” marking a shift from its earlier post-merger phase, which was focused on internal “shoring up.”
Truist was formed by the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust. In 2022 and 2023, it faced significant challenges, including a $1.45 billion loss in 2023, technology integration snags, and customer-facing issues such as deactivated cards and transaction declines.
“It feels quite good right now. It feels positive. The momentum is good,” said Maguire, who joined the bank in 2022. He stated that Truist has since built the infrastructure to enable better expense management. “We’re really just thinking about the mix of growth with a focus on profitability,” he added.
Truist on hiring and efficiency
Charlotte-based Truist is actively expanding its teams across core businesses, including investment, corporate and commercial bankers, as well as wealth and retail bankers, Maguire said.
This strategic hiring is being funded by a focus on efficiency, with the bank “constantly finding waste” and leveraging automation to create capacity for investment. He did not elaborate on where the waste was.
AI and underwriting risk at Truist
Maguire addressed the growing concern of AI disruption, saying Truist is actively assessing the risk across its portfolio, with particular focus on the software industry. The bank’s underwriting process is on a deal-by-deal basis.
“It’s a new world, and so we’re going to be looking differently at all the businesses that we underwrite, and try to think about, you know, these types of risks.”
Truist on consumer resilience and growth mix
Despite economic uncertainties, Maguire reported that consumer and client sentiment remains “upbeat.” “People continue to spend, and they continue to save,” he said. The bank, however, is closely monitoring the “lower end consumer” in its auto business and certain consumer discretionary sectors like restaurants.
Deposits remain a top priority, with efforts focused on attracting new retail households, more fully serving existing “premier segment” clients with non-banked assets, and investing in treasury management products for wholesale clients.
Truist is de-emphasizing businesses with less short-term profit potential.
This means commercial and industrial businesses are expected to grow at 4 to 5% or more, while some consumer segments, like indirect auto or mortgage, will slow their growth or not grow at all, Maguire said. The bank will prioritize more profitable parts of its consumer business, such as specialized segments like service finance.
Corporate and commercial banking hiring is concentrated on specific industries and geographic hubs, such as healthcare expertise in Nashville and fintech and payments expertise in Atlanta, to meet client demand. Maguire is confident Truist on track to achieve its target of a 15% return on tangible common equity by 2027.
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Catherine Muccigrosso
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