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Bank of America Corp. broadened its search for a chief executive officer to include candidates who want to live in New York, acknowledging the bank's biggest units are no longer based in Charlotte, people familiar with the matter said.
The board - led by Chairman Walter Massey - is also concerned there may not be a deep enough pool of qualified candidates willing to move to Charlotte, 400 miles south of Washington, the people said, speaking anonymously because the search is private.
CEO Ken Lewis, who is stepping down at year's end, has said Charlotte will remain headquarters as long as he's in charge.
"It does reflect well on the board that they're not going to let the headquarters location limit their selection in terms of CEOs," said Thomas Brown, CEO of New York-based hedge fund Second Curve Capital. "There aren't too many people around the world who think that Charlotte is a major financial center."
Five board members with ties to Charlotte have stepped down during the past two years, and none of their replacements lives in the city, the state's largest. New directors live in Alabama, Delaware, New York, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Lewis, 62, is the only N.C. resident.
Former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. told a Charlotte group on Oct. 22 that it's unclear whether the next CEO will be based in the city, according to four people who heard his comments at the meeting sponsored by Queens University of Charlotte.
McColl engineered the 1998 acquisition of San Francisco-based BankAmerica Corp., stipulating Charlotte's role as headquarters. He emphasized that he no longer influences the board's decision-making, according to the people who heard his comments. McColl didn't return telephone calls seeking comment.
Bank of America's investment banking and wealth-management businesses, which are run from New York, made up half of revenue through Sept. 30. That's up from 34 percent in the same period last year, before the acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co.
"With Merrill Lynch being such a big part of the ball game, the CEO probably ought to be in New York," said Arnold Danielson, chairman of Danielson & Associates, an investment banking firm in Bethesda, Maryland.
The home loans and insurance unit - which account for 14 percent of revenue - is based in the former Calabasas, Calif., headquarters of Countrywide Financial Corp., which the bank acquired in 2008. The credit card services unit makes up 23 percent of revenue and is based in Wilmington.
The consumer-banking business under Brian Moynihan in Boston made up 11 percent of revenue. All told, that means about 98 percent of the bank's revenue comes from units headed by executives based outside Charlotte.
"We aren't going to comment on speculation on the process," bank spokesman Jerry Dubrowski said.
Massey leads a search committee of six directors, three of whom joined the board upon the FleetBoston acquisition.
"Some of the Fleet members have no allegiance to Charlotte," Brown said.
Charlotte was home to two of the four biggest U.S. banks until San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. bought Charlotte-based Wachovia Corp. in an October 2008 sale brokered by government regulators.
Bank of America employs 15,000 people in its hometown, said Bob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber, a group that promotes local business interests. That's about 5 percent of the bank's global workforce of 281,863. Wells Fargo has about 19,000 employees in the city after cutting about 2,000 jobs there during the past year, Morgan said.
New Yorkers contacted about the job include Charles Scharf, retail banking head at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., a person familiar with the matter said. Robert Kelly, CEO of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and a former Wachovia chief financial officer, "has said he has no interest in the job," spokesman Kevin Heine said Tuesday.
A JPMorgan spokesman, Thomas Kelly, declined to comment on behalf of Scharf.
