Bank of America CEO: 'We're clearly' a technology company

In a new interview with Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan discusses his outlook on fintech and why he views the bank as a tech company.

Video Transcript

- I want to ask about the technology side of the bank too because you now how 41 million active digital banking users, 32 million of them on mobile. You guys have 4,900 patents. And so you have a strong technology piece to your business.

But there does seem to be this divide in the public consciousness, and in the markets for that matter, between big banks and fintech. Do you think that divide is justified? And do you think of Bank of America as a technology company?

BRIAN MOYNIHAN: Well, we're clearly a technology company. I mean, we spend about 3 and 1/2 billion a year on new code implementation. New products and services are driven by technology.

In the basics, our company is a great group of teammates, 200,000 plus teammates, just very excellent teammates, doing what they're supposed to do. A huge amount of data and information, which they process on behalf of clients and help clients conduct their business and live their lives, whether it's a big company or a small company, or a person, or a wealthy person. And so they use computers and that data.

And then we have a lot of buildings to keep them all dry so they can work every day. Really, that's what we are. So if we're not a technology company, we can't be in business.

Now, let me give you, fill in, some of the blanks here. You know, you hear a lot about digital payments. Of that $2.8 trillion I talked about of consumers at Bank of America moving money around, well, over half of that is digital.

If you look at our sales of products last quarter, I think we had a million in digital sales, about 45%, were all digital. Over the last few years, we've been able to digitally enable the mortgage transaction and the opening of a checking account, end-to-end, and all these things.

In fact, we have Merrill Edge which in the classic case, back in the old days, was an online broker and now they have different names for it. But it's effectively a $300 billion plus, growing rapidly, company that is in the online trading business, self-directed trading business for customers.

So we have all these parts. And we drive them. And meanwhile, on the institutional side, almost all our money moves digitally. It's $3 trillion a day. So the idea of digital payments and stuff, that's been going on for years.

Zelle is growing very fast, our company, about 80%, year over year. And I think we hit new milestones last quarter. Erica, which is a voice activated or type activated virtual assistant, artificial intelligence driven, has 17 million, 15 million, users or whatever it is, engaging hundreds of millions of times a quarter on it. We had a couple of billion digital interactions last quarter.

I mean, these are just huge numbers. But at the end of the day, you also have to remember what makes us unique is we also have 200,000 teammates. And so when those clients need people in our 4,000 branches, that they need to have something go on at those branches, it may not be the old tasks, but the new tasks, they can come in those branches and get appointments. And those can be set up digitally. And that is important.

So we're high touch and high tech. When you get to the wealth management business, obviously, a financial advisor at Merrill and the private bankers and private bank are tremendously important to client interface and the commercial businesses, the relationship managers, the investment bankers you mentioned. So it takes high touch, high tech. But at its core, we have a huge digital platform, a huge technology platform, going on every day in this company.