When Alvaro de Molina left J.P. Morgan’s emerging-markets investment banking division 15 years ago to join North Carolina National Bank, his boss, Nick Rohatyn, was stunned. “You’re going where?” de Molina recalls Rohatyn asking. “He thought I was nuts,” says de Molina, who last month was tapped by Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to head the firm’s 6,400-person global corporate and investment banking division. “But it’s worked out pretty well.”
Indeed. Under Hugh McColl, NCNB became NationsBank and gobbled up a slew of regional competitors before acquiring BofA in 1998 and adopting the San Francisco bank’s name. The Cuban-born de Molina, who came to the U.S. when he was three years old, has performed a number of financial roles for the bank, including overseeing its capital markets funding activities and chairing its asset-liability committee. When longtime GCIB head Ed Brown retired last month, Lewis unexpectedly tapped de Molina, 46, to run the division. “It took me completely by surprise,” says the new corporate chief. “I was looking toward the CFO role. My real objective was to do that for a few years and then go run a business line. Now I’m here, and I’m very charged up about it.”
De Molina is a fervent believer that banks like BofA, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, with huge balance sheets and lending capabilities, can better serve corporate clients than traditional Wall Street investment banks. “There’s plenty of evidence that the universal model is the most powerful model,” he says. “I intend to aggressively build the business.”
For his part, Brown, 55, a 32-year BofA veteran who had recently been charged with aggressively building GCIB, went to Lewis last year and asked to set a retirement date. “It’s been really stressful for me these past few years,” Brown confides. “By no means am I going to crawl under a rock and die, but I want to take some time off and rest. I want to recharge my batteries and spend some time with my family, figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life, and then I’m going to do it.”
