There are three ways that Robert H. Doherty, Bank of America’s New Jersey market president, gauges the size of his institution in the Garden State:
First off, the bank does business with more than half of all people living in the state … it’s connected with between a third to a half of all commercial entities based here … and it ranks among the state’s Top 10 employers.
None of that has changed all too recently.
What’s new is that there’s a once-significant measure that Doherty chooses to omit today: the amount of retail spaces it has in the state.
Don’t misunderstand — Bank of America still has a whopping 250 financial centers in the state, more than most.
But that number isn’t growing. In fact, it’s very slowly shrinking, like with most banks amid today’s mobile banking boom. So, the monolithic banking institution doesn’t have the most branches in the state anymore; it renounced that title.
All the while, the industry leader’s mobile banking grew by almost a third last year. And during the first quarter of this year, the bank’s clients logged into their accounts 1.4 billion times — making 140 million bill payments and depositing 33 million checks through mobile devices.
Bank of America was one of the first institutions to incorporate the features of Zelle, a banker-led fintech solution. In April alone, the bank processed nearly 11 million transactions through Zelle, up 139 percent from the prior year.
The bank also recently introduced an AI-driven virtual assistant, Erica, in its mobile banking app. It hit a milestone of 1 million users within just two months. That program is just being added for the bank’s New Jersey clients as part of its phased nationwide rollout.
Read more here.