Bank of America Folds Fintech Investment Banking Team Into Tech

(Bloomberg) — Bank of America Corp. has folded its fintech investment banking team into its technology practice, reflecting the industrywide shift in financial services toward software.

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The lender is moving about 50 bankers into its roughly 200-strong tech group, according to Kevin Brunner, the bank’s chairman of global M&A and global head of technology, media and telecom investment banking.

Fintech is a catch-all term for more than a dozen types of financial-oriented tech companies, including payments providers, stock exchanges, online brokers, data sellers, portfolio-management software makers and digital-lending platforms. While the way the way banks cover those businesses varies from firm to firm, they usually fall within financial services, given how closely intertwined banking has been with classic fintech verticals such as payments.

That’s changing as financial technology begins to resemble traditional technology, particularly software, Brunner said in an interview last week at Bank of America’s Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco.

“Fintech payments and software are bound to intersect,” he said. Fintech companies also also have a similar financial profile to software companies, so it makes sense to have them covered by the same group.

The organizational change-up comes in conjunction with Brunner’s appointment this summer to run technology, media and telecom banking after serving as co-head of global M&A.