Bank of America Corp. said it won’t cut any jobs this year as a result of the coronavirus, and is helping clients affected by the pandemic through increased commercial lending to companies and expanded forbearance for Main Street customers.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based lender has hired 2,000 people this month and is shifting more than 3,000 employees to new roles in its consumer and small-business divisions to deal with the crisis, according to a company memo seen by Bloomberg. The moves include internal and external hires.
“We don’t want our teammates to worry about their jobs during a time like this,” Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said in a CNBC interview Friday. “And we’ll continue to pay everybody, even those who can’t work from home.”
Bank of America joins U.S. lenders Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, along with European counterparts including HSBC Holdings, in pledging to preserve jobs amid the widespread impact of the coronavirus. The banks are seeking to reassure their employees as the pandemic roils markets and raises the prospect of deep losses industrywide.
Rather than selling off assets at a steep discount, the Dallas company is considering taking equity positions in energy firms struggling to make loan payments in the wake of collapsing prices.
In a down economy, international planning is even more important.
Discover transitioned all of its 8,000 U.S.-based call center personnel to work from home within a matter of days after the U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13. By March 20, Discover had 95% of its agents working from home using a thin-client device to emulate their call center desktops.
Bank of America has extended more than $50 billion in loans to commercial clients this month so they can build up cash and pay employees, according to Moynihan.
“We’ve put our capital to work to increase the new lines of credit, the draws in lines of credit, the access to markets,” he said.
Other takeaways from the interview:
- “We’re going to make sure we maintain strong capital ratios and strong liquidity right through this crisis,” Moynihan said.
- The nation’s top 40 banks are all waiting for the implementation of government assistance programs.
- Bank of America has “a limited number of cases” of the virus among staff members.
- About 150,000 of the company’s 208,000 employees are working from home, and it boosted the number of staffers who have compter monitors at home to 50,000 from 10,000 in five weeks.