NEW YORK  - Bank of America  is culling the herd on the street. The $284 billion lender on Monday said it is eliminating the Merrill Lynch name from its investment bank and shortening it at its brokerage. Deciding when to ditch the brand of an acquired firm can be a tough call. Waiting for a decade, though, has allowed Chief Executive Brian Moynihan to judge where the name has – and hasn’t – helped.

While 10 years is a long time, it’s by no means a record in financial nomenclature. Credit Suisse invested in First Boston in 1978 and took control a decade later, but only abandoned the American brand name in 2005. The Swiss bank was, though, quick to consign DLJ to the history books for all but some private-equity funds after snapping the firm up in 2000. Some 15 years after JPMorgan merged with Chase, meanwhile, the two brands exist cozily alongside each other – one for the institutional side of the business and one for the retail bankers.

The fear at investment banks and brokerage houses is that canning a subsumed company’s identity aggravates already disaffected staff acquired in the deal. Mass departures, especially if talent goes to rivals, can undermine the reason for doing a transaction in the first place. BofA’s takeover, of course, effectively saved Merrill from going under in 2008, but that didn’t prevent resentment among the Thundering Herd: Some coming in to work after the purchase were livid just to find BofA lapel pins on their desks.

But name changes can also backfire at retail banks. First Union – which would later be subsumed into what is now Wells Fargo – discovered that in 1998 when it bought CoreStates. The target had paid to have its brand plastered on Philadelphia’s basketball and hockey stadium. So acrimonious was the takeover that locals renamed it the F.U. Arena.

Some 10 years after the Merrill deal, though, Moynihan has more than enough information to make the call to cull. The investment bank – now just Bank of America Securities – is a big hitter in loans and bonds. Its combined equity underwriting and M&A franchises are no slouches, ranking fifth globally in each category last year, according to league-table data from Refinitiv. But that’s lower than the two separate firms’ showing in 2007 would have suggested.

The brokerage, meanwhile, is stampeding ahead, posting an enviable 28 percent pre-tax margin in 2018. That makes it a brand worth running with.

CONTEXT NEWS

- Bank of America on Feb. 25 said it is changing the name of its investment bank from Bank of America Merrill Lynch to Bank of America Securities. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank is also renaming its wealth-management businesses as Merrill.

- Bank of America closed its deal to buy Merrill Lynch in 2009.

(( antony.currie@thomsonreuters.com ; Reuters Messaging: antony.currie.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net ))

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