Service with a Purpose

The Bank of America became the world's largest private bank by developing special services for almost every need. This week it added three more:

¶ A comprehensive credit card that will permit holders to charge everything from shoes and doctors' bills to liquor and the costs of artificial insemination of cows. "Bankamericard" customers will be billed at the end of each month, charged 1½%-a-month interest if they wish to let the bill go longer than 25 days. The cards are free and available to nondepositors. The bank will collect up to 6% from participating merchants on purchases.

¶ A service that takes over all payroll problems for individual business firms, pays wages and salaries, social security, government taxes, etc. Operated on a cost-plus-fee basis, the plan has already been tried successfully by a dozen San Francisco firms.

¶ The handling of premium coupons for manufacturers, who issue more than a billion a year with soap, cereals and other grocery items. The bank will tot them up, provide refunds from the firms.

Why the new services? Says President S. (for Seth) Clark Beise: "The way we live, the way we do business has changed, and the Bank of America has had to change too."

By keeping up with the changes, the Bank of America has cashed in handsomely on California's tremendous postwar boom. Branches are being opened at the rate of two a month, have grown from 494 in 1946 to 638 today, scattered through 350 cities in California and abroad. Since World War II the bank has doubled its size, its business, its personnel, its deposits. Today it employs 23,500 people, offers 55 different services to its customers (7,000,000 accounts).

Much of this progress has come under President Beise, 60, a Minnesota doctor's son who is as calm and unruffled as the late Bank of America Founder A. P. Giannini was irascible and temperamental. Beise (rhymes with icy) joined the Bank of America in 1936 at Giannini's invitation after an early career in banking, took over as president in 1954. So wrapped up is he in his job that he has given up all outside hobbies (except gardening). His chief task has been to transform the bank from the temperamental, one-man bailiwick of autocratic A. P. Giannini into a smoothly mechanical, multiple-management operation.