BofA Brings Back Some of its Jobs

ORANGE COUNTY, CA-Bank of America Corp., which pulled thousands of jobs out of Southern California two years ago, is about to put some of them back.

The banking giant has decided to consolidate its Premier Banking Division into its long-time Orange County facility. Before now, the division was split between the county and San Francisco.

The division specializes in serving high-net-worth clients who often need a greater array of services than a typical customer. It’s the fast-growing segment of the bank’s business, says Kim Burdick, who has headed the division’s Southland operations since 1998.

Folding the San Francisco office into the Orange County operations will result in Burdick overseeing an expanded staff of 450 employees. They will be responsible for 200,000 accounts with balances of at least $100,000 each, Burdick says.

The decision is welcome news for Southern California, which has lost several thousand BofA jobs since the bank merged with Nation’s Bank in 1998. Many of the jobs went to Nation’s Bank’s home state of North Carolina, others went to Bank of America’s old headquarters in San Francisco and still others were simply eliminated.