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Bank of America Slashes More Jobs Amid Falling Distressed Loan Volume

BankofAmerica [1]

Bank of America [2] has announced that it will be cutting about 100 jobs in its headquarter city of Charlotte, North Carolina, with the majority of those jobs coming from the department that handles troubled mortgage loans.

The bank has been focused on reducing expenses since Brian Moynihan took over as CEO in 2010, according to a report in the Charlotte Observer [3]. The cuts being made are from the bank’s Legacy Asset Servicing (LAS) Division, which works with customers who are delinquent on their mortgage payments, and the technology and operations unit.

The number of 60-plus day delinquent loans serviced by the LAS unit has dramatically declined in the last two years. The LAS unit was handling about 325,000 loans as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2013, but the number fell by 42 percent down to about 189,000 by the fourth quarter of 2014. At the end of the third quarter of 2015, the bank’s LAS unit was handling about 107,000 delinquent loans, according to the bank’s Q3 earnings statement [4] released earlier in October.

The number of Bank of America employees worldwide declined by about 14,300 from Q3 2014 to Q3 2015, down to about 215,000; the number of the bank’s employees has declined by about 69,000 since Moynihan became CEO five years ago, according to reports. The bank has stated that it has about 15,000 employees in its home city of Charlotte.

Bank spokesman Dan Frahm said the affected employees will be able to apply for other positions with Bank of America, and those who don’t will be eligible for severance and career counseling.

In February 2015 [5], Bank of America cut about 250 jobs in its home city of Charlotte. Like the layoffs just announced, the affected employees worked in the Legacy Asset Servicing Division.

Bank of America is not the only big bank making job cuts; earlier in October, Wells Fargo announced [6] that it was slashing about 500 jobs from its mortgage division for reasons similar to the Bank of America cuts—changes to the market that included a reduction in delinquent loan inventory and foreclosure rates and a reduced demand and a reduced demand for mortgage financing.