‘Charlotte will always be a flagship.’ Our 15 minutes with a Bank of America exec
From the 56th floor office of Bank of America Corporate Center in uptown Charlotte, Holly O’Neill sits with her back to the skyline view of the tops of towers, including the bank’s name atop Legacy Union five blocks away.
O’Neill, president of consumer, retail and preferred for Bank of America for the past year, had flown in from Boston on Wednesday morning and was flying out later that day. She has been with the Charlotte-based bank and second-largest bank in the country for over 30 years.
The Charlotte Observer had 15 minutes to speak with O’Neill amid her packed schedule getting in five questions, and one quick bonus. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Given Bank of America’s deep roots here, how do you see Charlotte serving your national consumer strategy, especially regarding opening new branches and local employee development? How do you balance physical branches and digital first?
Charlotte will always be a flagship for us. We have a well-established financial center footprint here in Charlotte that will continue even as we transform consumer banking and digital and physical. What we find is that while we lead digitally and most of our interactions are digital that a physical footprint is incredibly important to the communities where we exist. Having that physical presence and commitment to those communities, including Charlotte, is incredibly important.
What we’ve seen over the last decade is that the role of the financial center has changed a little bit in that it’s gone from just being a transactional center to one that is more advice and guidance-based. We’ve made that transition alongside consumers’ expectations.
As technology gets better, we’ll be better able to serve clients and our teams.
Bank of America plans to open 150 new branches by 2027 despite the digital shift. For a customer in Charlotte, what is the single ‘job-to-be-done’ in a physical branch that you believe an app or AI will never truly replace?
The senior banker. Those senior bankers that sit in the financial centers that work with a client’s questions about how to manage their financial life or can’t be answered by our digital capability. Somebody who is a first-time homebuyer and has a lot of questions about how a home purchase process works. Some people just want that interaction across the desk.
We have a great digital platform. We have Better Money Habits, which is a financial education tool. I think that face-to-face connection with somebody who knows a broad range information that a client is interested in talking about is something we will have for a very long time.
We have 70 million clients. They all engage with us differently, and so we’ve got to have combinations of what we have available for clients.
Unlike some competitors, which are simply digital, we’ve got a multi-layer approach for clients with 50 million digital interactions a year and hundreds of millions of in-person interactions. Most clients actually use both in person and digital.
Some clients start with Erica (the bank’s virtual assistant) and end with talking to a person at one of our 3,500 locations across the country, and tens of thousands of specialists. They learn the basics in the digital platform, and then they’re sitting across the desk from a senior banker asking more complex questions.
We’ll continue to be both high-tech and high-touch. It’s all about choice.
AI tools like Erica have been framed as an ‘augmented teammate.’ As these tools reduce customer service calls, how are employee roles evolving? How do you ensure employees aren’t just replaced, but are retrained?
AI has huge opportunity and potential to make our teams even more skilled and to do more for our clients.
The transformation will happen gradually over time. We’ve already seen that transformation with how the business has evolved.
Over the last decade in our call centers, client service representative technology better skills them, better trains them, makes their jobs easier. It makes them more intuitive on how to engage with a client.
We’re all very interested in the AI technology. I think the adoption of it has to be very careful, for our teams and for our clients.
Unlike some competitors, which are simply digital, we’ve got a multi-layer approach for clients with 50 million digital interactions a year and hundreds of millions of in-person interactions. Most clients actually use both in person and digital.
We have a lot more work to do, but it’s exciting because the technology is going to help us to do that.
How do you sell the culture of a legacy financial institution to new employees (and potential new employees) while day-to-day work becomes increasingly automated?
If you come to work at a company like Bank of America, you can work in technology, in risk, directly with clients, operations, marketing, communications. There is no discipline that you don’t have access to. That’s what intrigues them about coming to work for a large company that’s constantly evolving.
What is the single biggest operational challenge that you are currently obsessed with, and how do you plan to resolve it to change the lives of your clients and employees?
I think the biggest opportunity we have is personalization. Really leveraging the data to make every engagement we have with our clients unique, so every touchpoint feels like we know exactly what they want and who they are, giving them the information in the way that’s relevant for them. We do this today, but I think there’s a big opportunity to use it even more.
I’ll give you an example. We do it at the ATM. Say we know that you always take $100 out at the ATM. It will prompt you, do you want to withdraw $100? How would you like the bills? But taking that to the next level. I think that’s our biggest opportunity is to leverage the data and the technology capability to make every client feel unique.
I think it’s the same (for) employees. We want them to have that career here. We want them to feel valued, always supported by world-class benefits. Giving our employees the opportunity to succeed with the tools, the skills, the opportunities.
As a female executive in a male-dominated industry, what advice or tips would you have for anybody who’s starting or considering a career in banking?
My advice is the same for everyone. It’s be yourself. Be open. Take risks. Try things that you may not have thought you wanted to try because sometimes those are the doors that open to career opportunity. Those are times that you learn the most. I have three Gen Zs at home and I often say take the assignment, you’ll either learn you really like it or you don’t want to go down that path.
This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 5:05 AM with the headline "‘Charlotte will always be a flagship.’ Our 15 minutes with a Bank of America exec."
