Good morning. I guess we'll go ahead and get started. So I would like to welcome you all to Bank of America's 32nd Annual Financial Services Conference. I'm Ebrahim Poonawala, I head North American Bank Research for BofA. This is the second year of our revamped Financial Services conference that brings under one roof, banks, asset managers, exchanges, insurers and card companies.
And by the looks of it, corporates and buy side seems to be liking it. Corporate attendance this year, up 20% year-over-year. We are hosting approximately 300 institutional investors across U.S., Canada, U.K., EU. And we are also hosting some must-attend thematic panels to discuss the latest on the regulatory outlook, evolving risk for the commercial real estate market and multiple tech-focused panels.
I would like to thank my colleagues in research, Craig Siegenthaler and Josh Shanker for hard work in putting together a great event. I would also like to acknowledge Candace Browning, Head of Global Research for BofA. She's in the room. Under Candace's leadership, BofA's Equity Research was ranked #1 in last year's II rankings, not just in the Americas but also globally. So Candace, thanks for joining us today, and thanks for your stewardship.
Without further ado, I would like to welcome our keynote speaker for the day, Brian Moynihan, Chair and CEO of Bank of America. My big boss. Brian, thanks for being here.
So it's with great risk, Ebrahim. So...
Well, it can't get more high stakes than me. You might have a new bank analyst tomorrow at BofA.
So first of all, thanks a lot for joining us. And I think, I guess, this has been a theme over the last year in terms of this, the prevailing macro uncertainty for bank investors. Maybe give us a sense around what your expectations where things stand today are on the macro outlook? The research team obviously expects a soft landing? Do you buy into it? Maybe if you could kick it off there.
So one, thanks all of you for coming and supporting the conference and all the work that come together to different sectors of the financial services industry is important. Your presence is important. So thank you for joining us, and thank you for all the business that you do with the company.
So Candace and her team, not only #1 last year but 1 or 2 for many years. And they basically have predicted a soft landing. But they came down a little reluctantly, I'd say, as -- if you think about at the end of '22, when rates were going up and you saw -- there's something off here. You saw the rates move quickly. Everybody thought that would have to cause a recession, right? So they always had a mild recession, mild recession and then it kept moving out through the course of '23, from mid-'23, at the end of '23, then early '24. And finally, they took it off the table. And that's really due to the factors that you're all familiar with.
The strength in the American consumer is still there. The ability for the American consumer to borrow is still there. The activity levels are high. So we will stand a 500-plus basis point rise in rates, unprecedented level of movement. It's a 20-plus multiple rates, I mean, it's -- people forget that impact. And yet they predict basically 1 percentage like plus or minus growth this quarter, next quarter and then it starts to move back to trend as we go through.
The other key thing, I'd say, Ebrahim, that -- I'd look all the blue-chip economists and over the course of the last 1.5 years, the thing that was hard to square was the idea that unemployment would only go into the mid- to high 4s and you were going to have a recession, because I've yet to figure out and economists to explain to me an unemployment-less recession. And -- and so that was kind of the -- and when people employ, they spend. So I think Candace and team have been extremely good at this, and they basically have put this sort of slowdown.
Now the key that -- never forget, from a 4% growth rate in the third quarter, 4% plus, almost 5% in the third quarter of '23 to 1% in the first quarter of this year, 1.5% is a slowdown. And people are forgetting that, that -- if we went from plus 2% to minus 2%, all hell would be breaking loose, right? People are forgetting that is a lot of economic activity that the drag of -- the monetary drag is really creating at this point.
Got it. And I guess just as you talk to customers, what are you hearing from clients just around confidence towards investments, M&A, et cetera?
So if you look at the different types of customers on the consumer side, we have the data base where we can see every week what consumers are doing. And so far, year-to-date, the amount of money moving out of their accounts in the economy, that's through a credit card charge, debit card charge, an ACH payment, a wire, a Zelle payment, a check, cash out, out of the ATMs and over the transmit to branches, all going into the economy is up about 4% to 5% versus last year at this time. That growth rate was double digits last year, i.e., in '23 compared to '22. So it has slowed down in '23. That 4% to 5%, that will be 4.5% -- 4.2%, 4.5% so it's bounced around each week.
But when you look at it, that is very similar to the '17 to '18, when rates were raised, when the economy slowed down -- the economy was sitting with a 2% inflation, around 2% growth. And so that's kind of the in-built rate of the consumer spending. When you look within that and Candace and the team through the Institute published sort of where they spend, you'll see different patterns for different generations and he was spending more on restaurants and things like that. But the good news is it's relatively consistent.
When you go to the commercial side, it's interesting. Commercial customers line usage, and you'll this from my colleagues, has basically flattened out again. So before pandemics, midsized clients, some clients would have draw -- large clients never really draw in the lines, but midsized clients would draw like 40%. It dropped to 30% during the pandemic, moved back up to 36% or so percent, 37%. We thought it was going to normalize back to the 40-ish percent level. It just hasn't done it. It's starting to flatten out. And that's why loan growth is a dogfight right now. We saw a little bit in the fourth quarter, but it's -- we're just constantly working -- because line usage of -- each point of line usage is a lot of loan growth.
And so -- and why are people using alliance? Well, commercial customer a little more conservative between geopolitics, wars, supply chain normalizing and then getting disrupted and then normalizing and getting disrupted, to worry about final demand, they're being relatively conservative, but they have lots of capacity.
When we go to investors, the investors continue to -- all of you continue to move it around and are investing in the classic sort of fourth quarter, first quarter lift and things are going on. But -- and Jimmy and the team have done a great job in the business and were record levels of revenue last year of $17 billion. But when you think about it, those investors feel pretty confident, that's what you're seeing in the market translation. But everybody is looking for the same thing, what will be the stability factor out there? And that right now, Fed rates, other central bank rates and then secondly, some resolution without an escalation of the issues of [ kinetic work ].
Got it. And I think, Brian, over the last couple of years, you've cited excess consumer deposits. I'm just wondering how much has that receded over the last year? And do you see a divergence between higher-income versus lower-income consumers?
Yes. I think -- so if you look at pure deposit side behavior in the consumer business, we track a set of customers fairly carefully since -- we always track them. But pre-pandemic, we went and said, let's watch these customers over time, because something very different was going on. So -- and if you look across those customers, the customers in the higher end are actually down deposits where they were pre-pandemic. When I mean higher, I mean people have an average of $1 million in their consumer checking accounts than deposit accounts. They're down 20%. Why? Because all that excess cash moved in the market.
When you come down from that and get to sort of people who are between $5,000 and $10,000 in -- before the pandemic, they went up to -- multiples of that. They averaged $7,000 went up to $21,000. And basically, they're flat and bouncing around right now. So year-over-year, they're a 1 percentage point difference month-to-month, they're up a little bit because IRS returns come in this month and next month. So they're fine. And if you go below that, to the next cohort, $2,000 to $5,000, they were $3,400 pre-pandemic, they peak to $13,400. They're sitting at $12,700, $12,800 and again, bouncing around flattish. So there's money in those accounts.
Now there's a whole cohort of people who became [indiscernible] adults in '21, '22, '23 that had different experience because they didn't get the stimulus as much and things like that. So you have -- there's other people, what you're seeing is a little bit of dichotomy between medium coming down, having more stress out there which we don't see in our customer base, especially our mature customer base in all honesty.
Maybe just going off script here, but I think, if you don't mind, we have global investors. In terms of just talking about the difference between what you're seeing in the U.S., I mean, I think there's something to be said about the underlying economic strength in the U.S. and how that translates to growth for a bank like ours.
Yes. I think -- so if you look -- if you talk -- outside the United States and at the end of January, we were all there and listening to the people, the United States is a premier place to invest right now for 2 reasons. One is you can get the returns and -- the classic reasons, returns, rule of law, labor force, et cetera. It has been proven and huge final demand. That's -- people forget the U.S. consumer economy is about as big as the Chinese economy. So a huge final demand. And so -- for types of product cars or whatever.
When you go to the unique thing that's happened is if you think about the legislation pass between infrastructure chips, IRA, et cetera, that's also huge benefits to people who make the investment. So whether it's in clean energy, whether it's in rows and building -- bridges, whether it's in chip foundries and stuff, which are just starting to come on stream, that is another reason why Candace and the team and your economists have to be careful. Because there's a huge stimulus still coming through the economy. None of that money has really been spent. The IRA came in at the end of '22 -- '20. Yes, in '22, whatever.
And in those projects, it takes 7 years to get a project permitted. So nothing going on today is attributable to the IRA other than research dollars and stuff that are critically important. It is coming on. And so that's -- so there's a push and that's why outside the country, they look here and see U.S. growth rate going from 3%, 4% down to 1.5% and move back up to 2% on the size of this economy with some of incentives and stuff available. It's pretty interesting.
Got it. I guess maybe just moving to our businesses, I want to spend some time there. Starting with maybe wealth management, like it's an industry which is viewed as secular growth, a lot of changes. Just give us a sense of how it has evolved and what your outlook is for the business, for the industry over the next few years?
For wealth management?
For wealth management, yes.
So when -- over the years, historically, you had this issue that you had banks did well with general consumers and had private banks that were strong. And so you didn't have the middle. And so we all created bank brokerages and all the work we did, we bought Quick & Reilly, and we did all this. Since 2009, when we closed the Merrill deal, you've had this continuing bit. And so when we think about wealth management, we think about it from Merrill Edge all the way through the private bank. And so if you look across that business, the components are all doing well.
So what is Merrill Edge? Merrill Edge is $450 billion to $500 billion. Investment assets grew its account base by 10% year-over-year. Average account opening $60,000, $70,000, not $3,000 that you see there. Gets all the awards and -- but it's also really the first catchment basin for the new investment. And so we're putting a lot of effort and time behind that. And with the FSA teams, the branches, financial services, advisers, the branches, they help feed people into those products. MEGI, which is an automated rebalancing account, a guide to -- a Merrill Edge guide investing is growing exponentially. So that's one piece.
And then you move into Merrill in the private bank and it added 40,000-plus new customers last year, $84 billion of flows, $8 billion in AUM flows in the fourth quarter. They're sitting around $290 billion of deposits to $150 billion of loans, if I remember right. Profit margin, 26%. It's good, but it's a relationship management business driven by the financial advisers and therefore, the challenge is how do you scale it even further when you're already a huge scale, $3.8 trillion in customer assets and things like that? And how you are going to do that is really through process improvement and capabilities.
But as we look at the future, it's that continuum that gives us a competitive advantage. When people come in, we get their [ dust ] written in and then as they -- whatever happens to them over time, we can stay with them. And then the second thing is then just continuing to use the platform we have, like the digital platform, which is now standardized across all the products, again, meaning all the capabilities, again, is really a massive advantage because that scale allows us to have -- 90% of the private bank customers use digital interface, their advisers and stuff like that, I think in [ 80s ] and Merrill, et cetera.
And when I talk to Merrill affairs, I think what stands out to me is just the strength of the cross-sell opportunity and the stickiness that brings. Do you think that's humming along in terms of the bank speaking to the broker -- the journey you mentioned?
Each person that handles the customer has a responsibility to deliver the branded customer experience to that customer, which means everything we do. And if we don't do that, I think we fail the customer because our capabilities are better than anybody else's. And so the minute you have any customer has anything else anywhere, if you have a Merrill -- private bank customer has a self-directed account, that should be a Merrill Edge account, not someone else because we can give them better insight and information and capabilities. If they have a bank account somewhere, a credit card, a mortgage, you pick a commercial loan -- and so that capability continues to improve.
We've been at it a long time. It's not as easy as people think. Last year, 150,000 wealth management clients opened banking accounts with us, banking relationships out of the 3 million plus there. So there's a lot of -- there's infinite room to grow that. The team does a great job today. But as I say, it's a nice start.
Got it. And I guess the other theme around wealth management is just the interest in alternative investments. If you can just talk to what we are doing, what's the demand from clients for these products?
It's an area where we -- Nancy Fahmy and Chris Hyzy and the team and across the platform advise themselves. It's an area where you have lots of potential growth because if you just look at the pure asset allocation, advice we give people, the amount of alternatives that we have to offer them doesn't equal that quite yet. So we are adding more and more capabilities from a lot of these firms. And it takes a bit to get up on our platform because we will not do something we can't do a great job with. We just really get it out to the whole team and make it available. But those that get us see a good job. And we think it's a lot of growth ahead of us.
At the end of the day, we made a decision, I don't know, 15 years -- 12, 13 years ago or whenever it was, to get out of the pure asset management business with Columbia, and we sold that. And so our job is to mix all these great firms' capabilities to our customer base, including their alternative capabilities.
Just last one on wealth management. When you think about the business, you talked about the margin in that business. Do you see efficiency opportunities? Is there an efficiency player?
You do. But if you think about it, we're already very profitable -- the presentation of Wealth Management has -- the way the comp goes through, you take a $1, you get $0.50 of it and we make $0.25 to $0.30 of the $0.50 that's left after comp. It's a pretty efficient business right now. The issue is if you count that as a capture revenue, you'd sit there and say, my gosh. So in reality, it's just the methodology. So the comp system is the system we have and that is how the financial advisers and private client advisers in the private bank run.
The question is -- so the way you're going to increase profitability is really increasing its -- the capabilities of scaling it more and more and more and having advisers make more money in the company and make -- shareholders make more money. And that means continuing to digitize capabilities to allow the advisers and the teams to do more and serve more customers the way -- in a great way and then have more of that drop to bottom line while they make more money.
And that's the interesting question. That's where Merrill Edge is important because for smaller balance accounts, we can serve them completely automatedly. That's where the centralized capabilities we have for home lending or other things, a lot of incremental volume without much expense. And so we've got to keep doing that.
But there's -- it's still too paper intensive, still too document intensive. And then we've got to keep adding advisers. And we've been growing adviser counts slowly but in the markets, especially those markets where -- that are, for lack of a better term, stand-alone away from the banking area or places we're putting the bank into the market. We've got to make sure growing that adviser base.
And we have tremendous capabilities to do that. But we've got to grow advisers to understand their systems. So that's where the big training program came together last couple of years. So we have a combined training and access program for the team and the preferred business and consumer and the Merrill business and the private bank. So the teammates can come in and go all the way through the system. And that's -- that allows us to grow the advisers and give them places to grow, so he or she will be able to move through the system, develop a client base. And so there's referrals, but there's also a movement of people, which is also critical.
Got it. You mentioned markets, I guess, we'll be switching gears towards international investments. Like I see it when I'm traveling, meeting investors outside of the United States. Just talk to us in terms of where the investment focus has been. And if we've actually realized any wins over the last 5 to 10 years here.
Yes. So I think the care we take is not to talk about international. We talk about global. And so the reason why we do businesses in Global Markets and Global Corporate Investment Banking and some in Global Commercial Banking in middle market is because this business is global. And so our job is to serve the world's companies that participate in the supply chains and commerce on a global basis. That's the company side.
And then on the investor side, investors are global. So whether it's the research team or whether it's the execution capabilities in all the major markets around the world, that combination is critical because you can't understand financial services now unless you understand the global attack. You can't understand the auto business unless you understand the global parameters. You can't understand technology of various sorts. And so we've built these business to be global business.
So when you define international, people forget that this is all about how we serve 2,500 or so large multinationals in the corporate business and the largest divestures in the world -- across the world. And so we've invested a lot. And so where are the places to grow there? The markets team has been in the relevant markets for the research, and things ebb and flow and Jim and Bernie make decisions.
But if you go to -- like GTS and Mark Monaco are doing some things here. The need to invest and continue to invest in GTS to provide companies the ability to operate around the world is high. And so real-time payments in India, we just are finishing up. That's a requirement in order to be able to do what we want to do for customers, whether they're European companies operating in India or India companies -- or U.S. companies operating in India and vice versa, you want to be able to build that out. That's not cheap, $80 million to $100 million investment to bring that up.
And so our GTS capabilities around the world, CashPro the world, the investment banking coverage of Matthew and team around the world, we just keep developing it. So we're about 20-odd percent. Our international loans outstanding went from $20 billion to $100 billion across the last 10, 15 years. It's a big part of what we do. But -- and we're making investments in GTS, we're making investments in talent across the world. We're making investments in building out Europe the rest of the way, now that we've been settled there for 5, 6 years after Brexit. There's a lot of stuff going on in the Middle East and continue to invest there.
But the reality is this is all consistent with the strategy, which is large companies need us to serve them everywhere. And frankly, midsized companies in the U.S. are large companies on a global basis and play in the worldwide supply chain. And there's only a couple of us that can do that, that actually can handle a company that's making auto parts as they go out and meet the world in FX and sales and trade finance and all those things they have to deal with in advice.
A lot of these clients are going into places they don't know and our job using India as an example, [ Kaku ] and the team, there's many, many companies that have them have a discussion with what it's like to do business in India because it's different -- yes.
Different. But -- and just on the investments, I think there's a lot of folks look at Bank of America in terms of the expense discipline that you've had throughout your tenure. But I think we spent north of like $11 billion on technology investments. Just talk through in terms of if you had to bucket them into keeping up the systems, cybersecurity and investments in new innovation kind of stuff?
Yes. I think the way to think about it is what do we invest in sort of new initiatives? And so from '19, we have run around $3 billion, $3.2 billion, and now we're running at 3 8 -- $3.8 billion a year. And that -- that's just a new code going in. So this past weekend, a major implementation, the biggest one so far this year, several million lines of code kept on a lot of our systems and pushing it out. So we're constantly investing in those. And if you think of how that breaks down, a lot of it is around digital, a lot of it is around GTS capabilities, a lot around markets capabilities.
What did you think it would be? And everyone wants to always spend even more. The question is, can you get it done and get it done right, which is one of the tricks when you're making such massive scale change. But over the course of time here, we run the company today on about the same amount of dollars of expense that we ran it on in 2015 type of -- with 30,000 less people. We have deposits, some would have been probably, I don't know, $1 trillion or something like that. Now $1.9 trillion. The numbers of checking accounts went from probably $27 million to $37 million. The numbers of market transactions went up by multiple folds. The numbers of loans are up dramatically -- core loans. We had loans that were running off back then.
And so all that has been done through this digital implementation, and that's what leads the way. So most of the technology investment is literally just continuing to apply more and more capabilities in digital across the board. And so in that time frame, something like Erica has come on. So Erica has 18 million to 19 million users today. This is an artificial intelligence natural language processing, generates an answer of your question. Had to be carefully crafted, because in the financial services arena, the language wasn't consistent.
So if you googled, what's my balance, 10 years ago, you could have gotten a yoga instructor. Okay. And so you had to -- we went to Stanford and said, develop a language about financial services, and we applied it internally. And so you hear a lot about the supply to AI tools into your own data sets you control, that's what Erica was.
Now were we lucky or smart? No, but that's why we built it. So almost 200 million times last quarter, a client used Erica to get an answer, which would have been, what, 5 years ago, before Erica was there, it would have been a phone call, an e-mail, a text or whatever. And so 200 million times a quarter is a lot. And so -- it took 4 to 5 years for Erica to get to the first billion interfaces, it took 1 year to get the second billion. And that's the exponential growth.
So that kind of technology application -- or Zelle, which only came to -- clearXchange existed. That was Zelle's old name. We rebranded as an industry. But now the Zelle transactions sent are twice as [ many ] as the checks written.
So back to the point of how can you manage this down. One of the most costly -- one of the most prevalent and not a lot of value added to cash or check in the branch if we think about it. What's the customer experience? They get the check cash. That's not exactly something -- we're down from 16% to now by half. We are under 100 million checks deposited in the branch a quarter now. That was a big breakthrough. It took us years to get there. But -- then it goes down about 10%, 15% a year. That's because checks written are going down. And checks written are going down, why? Because Zelle transactions are twice as big as checks written now.
And so when you have this big enclosed customer base like we have, the check written turns up to be a check deposited and the check deposited can either go through the mobile check deposit at the branch, we've gotten to the point where basically ATMs and mobile take away 86% of the deposits of checks. That was a lot of work over time.
But on the other hand, what Zelle do is eliminating the writing of checks. And the math of that is tenfold and tenfold in terms of cost. And so that's how you manage it down. That's why you need less branches, because you're not taking as many checks on the transit and stuff like that. So it all -- and we you take those branches and dedicate them to the sales and relationship building as opposed to here's a piece of paper.
And just since you mentioned AI and language models, obviously, a big debate on AI, hype versus reality. I'm sure Silicon Valley, a lot of folks pitch you AI tools. How different is AI and the language models in terms of their ability to boost productivity versus technology always done that over the last 30 years in banking?
Well, at the end of the day, we know it works because that's what Erica is, and it's probably on a scale of 10 of what ChatGPT-5 will be able to do. Because, one, Erica doesn't access the whole Internet, for example, and stuff like that. It's probably 2 on a scale of 10, but it's very effective and very controlled and very -- so we know it works. Now the question is how do you apply it, when do you comply?
So the places we're using it now are obviously in that area, in other customer support areas, in multiple ways, again, controlled on our data. We're using in computer programming. And we're seeing some benefits when you have 30-odd-thousand programmers programming every day for you at 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% lift is pretty nice. And so we've seen that. But we're piloting and we're building up more and more confidence in it. Although there's some pluses and minuses of how that works and the industry will work through that.
You're seeing it in some of the write-ups and things like that, that we can do. And so there's 5 or 6 areas we know that we're running pilots/implementations. But it's all carefully crafted because at the end of the day, you can't do this unless your data is really understood and the logic that you're using is understood. And so the -- so one of the interesting things happening as the stuff goes is we all go interface to publicly available model, and it can come out with answers plus or minus, et cetera. The technology is getting better on that side. The models are learning how to correct themselves and the answers are getting better and et cetera.
But on the other side is the ability to bring that and apply it in-house. And that's what you're seeing, a massive push for people saying, wait a second, we can take these models and train them on your data inside your walls. Therefore, you don't have to worry about all these other risks other than does the model give a good answer, and that you can check if you know the data and know how it would come out and run comparisons. It's harder when you put it out in the public domain because you don't know exactly what's going on and the expectation risk and all that other stuff goes on. But -- so we think there's high hope here. It's just -- and we're seeing the application. Now the question is how do we do it in a way that a heavily regulated industry can do it?
Got it. I guess we talked about these global investments. We've also been investing a lot in the markets locally in the United States through the local markets organization. Just talk to us in terms of where that focus, I guess, in the middle market was from a geography product standpoint?
So, think about a couple of things. One is when you take stock of what happened in banking since I got involved in it in the early mid-80s. So you had interstate banking come through, and it sounds like a banking nerd response but I remember, this is exactly where I was standing when the Northeast Bancorp case was decided that said interstate banking could happen. I mean literally, I was standing [indiscernible] in this conference, I remember looking at the heating system and saying, oh my god, it's here, right?
And then we all went on a race in acquiring companies, putting together -- because we had been disallowed by law to have global national banking. And so that took off and then that led to the FleetBoston forming Northeast, the nation bank forming the Southeast, Bank of America, et cetera, et cetera, and then you have all that come together.
And yes, when you get to the end of that, and then you went through nonbank acquisitions and over the course of 2004 to 2009, what you end up with is something really interesting, which is those continuums from consumers all the way through a 15-year-old to the wealthiest person in the world, companies from small business to large companies on a global basis and investors from personal investors to -- that's the franchise. But when you actually look at the math, you're not in Ohio, you're not in Pittsburgh, you're not in New Orleans, you're in Denver, you're not in Minneapolis.
So we had to sit there and say, how do we go drive that presence across? So we started building out. And so in the 9 markets we started with a while back, to give you a sense, there's 130, 140 branches built today that have been open more than a year. There's more branches than that, the ones -- they average $200 million of branch now. So -- $180 million is the average. That's in those new markets, starting from [indiscernible]. And using all the assets we had, which we had Commercial Banking in some of these markets take Denver. We had Merrill Lynch in these markets. We had the private bank in some of these markets. And then using that to materialize more and more customer flows, and our digital capabilities fully built. You're building out and quickly. So we continue to fill that out.
But it all stems from the fact that you just weren't in these markets. I mean not by choice. You weren't there by just complete historical accident. So in top 30 markets at a time, I think we weren't in 10 of them or something like. Now we're in all of them. And now we're -- the market share, I think we're #1 in 11 and top 3 in top 17, 20 or something like that. It's all out there. But we continue to drive that. And that's what we're doing. But the value of that is how we work together in local markets.
So before we went in Pittsburgh, I think we had 10,000 customers sign up before we actually opened the branch. And that was due to the digital presence and also Merrill teammates starting to say, hey, we're coming, get your accounts open because now you're going to have a branch system and everything. In Columbus, we're up to 20-odd branches, the same type of thing. Cleveland and Cincinnati and now Dayton is going up and then Indianapolis.
And so using all the capabilities of the teammates in those new markets has been important. Then if you go to old markets, the issue was, as you took the corporate headquarters out of all these predecessor banks and left behind the lines of business, you had a bit of a sucking sound on punch in the market. And so what we did starting -- started 30 years ago, really saying, wait a second, we can do this better. And then late '90s, really went after it, and we've been improving it all through the Bank of America and CEO. So we have that -- those teams work together.
So in a market like Miami here, Gene Schaefer is the head of market, he brings the team together. They refer business back and forth. They operate as a team and present a unified front. And that's very beneficial, but part of that is putting the work we did. We had dinner at The Bass Museum last night. We support museums, in essence, market. We support other institutions, but having a local team drive all that is critically important because it gives a -- Gene is the CEO of this market. He can drive the market. And we hold him accountable for delivering business to each other, delivering teammate scores, delivering development among the teammates, delivering political outreach, delivering community outreach. They have to do everything that the whole company does in that market, and it's been effective.
And so two things. One is you're filling out the franchise, don't really have a lot of room to go there. But we're doing it very disciplined. Build out a market fully and get to top market share positions and drive it up. And then secondly, even in the market you thought you had good stuff, you can look and say, and there's just a lot of capacity to grow.
I guess one of the other businesses that's benefited from investments is the Global Markets business. Just talk us in terms of what the thought process has been there. And just are there additional opportunities investment-led that can drive more growth?
We often get asked by people, where would you put more capital? Where would you put more things? But end of day, capital is -- if you get the returns, it's infinite. We are generating earnings, we could put it to work, et cetera. So when Jim and the team and when Tom Montag was here, they said we need to start to move to a different place here. The research team was very strong and fully built out. The investment banking team was covering the world. And the question was, could we move markets to another place and financing opportunities and other things, but do it with our risk view and our capabilities view. And so they started doing that. So we increased the balance sheet by a couple of hundred billion, the capital allocation went up, obviously, along with that.
And they did $17 billion in revenue. And at the time we did it, they were probably doing $12 billion to $13 billion a year. And so it's been a massive step change, and they've gotten into the top 3 position generally in most of the products.
There's places we still are not playing as hard as -- on purpose in a lot of other places. We have a lot of room to grow. And it's -- and Jim has done a great job, and you can see that, just the materialization of the market's up 5%, we're up higher than that. The market is down 3%, we're flat -- we're always sort of making a little bit of ground, but it's a grind to keep doing that. And that's significant.
And so they're making about $1 billion -- they make about 16% of the earnings of the company. It's -- it and Wealth Management are like 16% to 15%, Global Banking and consumer are going to be the big businesses. But this business has a lot of growth ahead of it, and we keep investing in it. And Jim and the team have done a great job.
Got it. And now we have a few minutes, I just wanted to open up and see if there are any questions in the audience. Go ahead.
Brian, thank you for joining us. My question is, as you speak to shareholders and investors, what do you think is most unappreciated with the story today for Bank of America? Is it the synergies between all these leading businesses? Is it the ability to use AI and technology to make us more efficient and drive incremental margins? What do you think?
I think the -- I think it's all the above plus it's just pure organic growth. Because you're so big, this goes on, that goes on, the COVID goes on. Think about it. But -- so if you think about the last 4 years, we've had COVID, the recovery from COVID, the stimulus, over stimulus, monetary response towards et cetera. And we've averaged $25 billion in after-tax earnings in 4 years. That's the power of this franchise.
But most important of that, we've gone -- we're probably 10% bigger in core consumer checking accounts, all primary checking accounts. We've added tens of thousands of wealth management customers. So -- and the 2,000 banking customers last year, markets have moved from a $12 billion to $13 billion revenue base to a $17 billion revenue base. Investment banking, it has gained share even though the market is down.
So the idea that we think about is just making sure people realize that when we grow -- outgrow the market from pre-pandemic to now in deposits, the percentage -- but the difference is the sheer dollar amount and customer flows are just huge, and that's what we just keep having to make sure people see. Because there's always 8,000 things going on about -- worries about credit risk, worries about this. But you see this underlying engine that during times when the market -- when the world was bouncing around us, we earned $17 billion, $20 billion, now we're in $25 billion to $30 billion. And so move the earnings up through the efficiency and effectiveness.
So this organic growth engine, it's hard to fathom when you start to think about, yes, you grow consumer customers from 34 billion to 37 billion, 38 billion. That growth in primary household checking customers is equal to most banks.
There's another question. We have time for one more.
Thanks, Brian. Can you talk about the growth of private credit? Do you see them as a competitor, potential partner, chances to work gather? And then separately from how you think about them versus us and our peers, how do you think about private credit in terms of systemic risk in financial services?
So taking the last part first, we as a company, and frankly, we as the major players have always believed that if you do something, you should be held to the same standards. If we believe it's important that you can't overlend to a consumer or overlend to a company, why do you let it go on outside from a systemic market impact type of question. And the answer could be -- well, those are big players, they can lose money. Say, well, that's not good for the economy. The company still goes through rework and stuff.
So we've always been -- whether in mortgage banking in the regulated bank in -- you have to do it the same way. Cards, mortgages, commercial banking, payments all ought to be regulated the same way. We're not there. Let's just be honest about it. They've never gotten it done. It was goal of the post-financial crisis regulation. Because what people forget about is most of the companies had the real problems were actually out to the banking system prior to the umbrella being thrown over, Merrill and Goldman and Morgan Stanley on that side and then also some of the nonbank companies on the other side.
So one, we've got to get that. So that's the -- private credit is all the things you said. We work with people on the -- distribute stuff to them. We work with people on partnership to finance these companies. We can do it on our own, if they meet our credit standards. So it's a complex relationship. And we have $1 trillion of commercial credit commitments out there.
So the $10 billion, $20 billion fund sounds big from forming for that group and the management fees and what they do. But in the context of the commercial exposure we have, it's a relatively modest thing. So then the question is where do we compete and how do we compete against them? And the answer is if the credit is worth doing, we're still -- it's a credit worth doing. That's one question. The credit is not something we can do. That's another question.
And there's a fair amount of it that's in that category, which is fine. It goes on and stuff. If the credit we can do -- the question comes down to really companies like us and ourselves in particular, we were built of a distributed risk model of high order. So we would do a $20 billion [ deal ] financing, end up with $25 million of exposure. It was just the way we thought. And when you think about it, you may have to rethink some of that. And with the capital base twice as big as it was before the financial crisis with the geographic distribution, both globally and domestically with the industry distribution we have, you can do that.
So Jeff and Bruce and Matthew and Jimmy, you have to think about, well, can we take higher hold positions, and we've been pushing them up to the credit, that provides a competitive advantage that's more similar. The duration they'll take and things like that, when you're just doing a net asset value type yield versus a NIM type yield to the equity, those are 2 different thought processes, so they'll be there.
And so we're working on all that stuff, friends, competitors, credits we do, credits we wouldn't do, hold positions, let it go, use them as distribution arms to actually spread risk, which is a good thing. And so there's some pluses and minus in all this, but it's something we pay attention to and look at.
With that, we are out of time. So Brian, again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much.
