Chairman,
Chief Executive Officer
and President
What's on tap for 2007.
The work we are doing in 2007 will include hundreds of important initiatives. I want to mention four broad categories of activity that cover most of them.First, we are continuing our intense pursuit of growth within all our businesses. These efforts include cross-line-of-business initiatives that create value for customers by combining capabilities across the enterprise, such as a universal decision engine that will bring efficiency and consistency to the credit decision process across a number of our large retail businesses. It includes investments we'll make in our businesses, such as those highlighted in the articles that follow this letter. It includes executing our U.S. Trust merger transition flawlessly.
The second item on this list is the most important thing we'll do this year to drive growth: get customer satisfaction scores moving north again. Regular readers of this letter will recall that in the first three years after adopting Six Sigma process improvement tools and methodologies across Bank of America, the percentage of customers rating themselves highly satisfied (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale) rose on average across the company by 11 percentage points, from 41 to 52 percent.
Two years later, those scores have hit a plateau. In response, associates throughout the company worked with customers throughout 2006 to better understand key drivers of satisfaction, and to reassess our efforts to drive satisfaction up. This year, every business has a refreshed plan to further improve customer satisfaction. The plans focus on value perception, service quality, operational excellence and problem resolution, and are tailored to the specific needs of customers served by each business.
Each of our major lines of business has established a goal of leading its industry in customer satisfaction within the next two to three years.
Third, Bank of America has long been a leader in developing environmentally sustainable business practices, from energy conservation and recycling programs to the financing of green building initiatives to our hybrid vehicle purchase assistance program for associates.
As one of the largest financial service providers in the country, the opportunity we see in the future is to finance and encourage the new products, services and technologies that will help meet future global energy needs. Our goal is to help our customers and clients take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and to protect the physical environment on which economic activity depends. We will launch several programs in 2007.
Finally, we are working harder than ever to help strengthen the many communities across the country and around the world in which we do business.
In the first two years of our 10-year, $750 billion community development goal, we have loaned and invested more than $160 billion in low- and moderate-income communities across the nation. We are focusing loans and investments in key markets in need of revitalization, and targeting grant support to strengthen local nonprofit organizations and to encourage asset building and financial literacy for consumers living and working in these markets.
The Bank of America Charitable Foundation, one of the most generous corporate foundations in the world, donated more than $200 million in our communities in 2006, and is on track to exceed our 10-year, $1.5 billion goal for giving.
Through the Foundation's flagship program, the Neighborhood Excellence Initiative™, we have donated nearly $50 million over the past three years and are pioneering a new approach to corporate giving — marked by a focus on local priorities, funding flexibility and leadership development — through which we not only give more, but we also give more effectively. All these programs and resources are managed in cooperation by leaders at the corporate and local levels, to ensure we are maximizing the impact of our work in all the neighborhoods we serve.
For more information on all our programs supporting the environment and our communities, I encourage you to visit our Web site, www.bankofamerica.com.
Next: Opportunity and leadership.
4. What's on tap for 2007.