美国银行

Bank of America reported robust second-quarter 2026 earnings results on July 14, sending shares up a low-single-digit percentage on the back of net revenue growth and earnings per share growth of 15% and 34%, respectively, from a year ago.

Why it matters: Despite a stronger relative footing in debt capital markets, Bank of America still enjoyed an equities tailwind across its investment banking and trading businesses to complement positive operating leverage and raised net interest income guidance. From 2013-2025, the firm averaged nearly 84% higher annual FICC trading revenue than in equities; thus, we believe the firm generating more equity trading revenue this past quarter truly encapsulates just how explosive equity trading volume has become, growing 70% from a year ago. We've been inspired to see net interest income guidance raised each quarter, beginning the year in the 5%-7% range and now at the upper end of 6%-8%, driven by balance sheet growth and fixed-rate asset repricing, though we believe the bank is still underpromising to overdeliver.

The bottom line: After digesting the second-quarter results for wide-moat Bank of America, we are raising our fair value estimate to $66 from $65, viewing shares as undervalued while held-to-maturity fixed-rate securities are continually redeployed at higher rates and the firm optimizes its operational footprint. As one of the pioneers of digital banking adoption, we believe the investment in bolstering platforms like Erica and Cash Pro is beginning to shine, demonstrated by 600 basis points of positive operating leverage this quarter, leading us to a more constructive expense growth forecast. We've raised our near-term trading revenue forecasts due to the perfect storm of geopolitical uncertainty and elevated asset levels, while the roll-over of low-yield, fixed-rate investments made in 2020-2021 propels long-run net interest margin expansion, even in a lower-rate environment at midcycle.

We've long held the thesis that the attractiveness of Bank of America's franchise to investors has been masked chiefly by a low-yielding held-to-maturity security portfolio comprised of mortgage-backed securities and long-duration treasuries yielding 1.9% and 1.4%, respectively. Over half of this portfolio is set to mature in the next five years, enabling net revenues to improve without any commensurate increase in portfolio risk, so long as the interest rate curve does not replicate the historically unusual shape we saw during the pandemic for an extended period.

Over a nearer time horizon, management has inched up its net interest income guidance each quarter, yet we believe that balance sheet growth alone will enable the firm to hit the approximately 7.5% level implied by the "upper end of 6-8%" range provided for the full year. With over 16% of interest-earning assets locked in at rates below 2%, the consistent maturation of this portfolio positions the firm as one of the larger beneficiaries in a higher-for-longer interest-rate environment, and we believe it is likely to exceed the near-term hurdle it has set for itself.

In addition to the anchor-like effect of the securities portfolio discussed, the efficiency ratio and returns on tangible common equity, two of the most important metrics by which investors assess and compare banks, have been muted by the elevated expense associated with bolstering Erica and Cash Pro over the past few years to service the consumer and commercial franchises. As these platforms transition from development to maintenance, a growing share of incremental net revenue should flow to the bottom line. Given the 600 basis points of positive operating leverage we witnessed this quarter alongside muted net interest margin expansion, we believe there may be even more upside to share prices over the cycle than our current fair value estimate suggests as the firm effectively fractionalizes technological investment across the second-largest deposit franchise in the United States. Lending credence to this view is the acceleration in quarterly client interactions with Erica by consumer banking clients to 200 million, up 15% from a year ago, freeing client representatives to focus on more value-added services.

We are maintaining our fair value estimate for Bank of America at $66 per share, which translates to a price/2026 earnings ratio and price/tangible book value of 13.3 times and 2.3 times, respectively. Our unchanged fair value estimate was the result of reductions to our investment banking and institutional trading forecasts in 2026 following updated guidance from the firm at the Barclays conference, offset by a slightly higher near-term interest rate forecast. We are now expecting a 0.25% increase in the federal-funds rate in December 2026, on top of the 0.25% hike in September 2026, with our revised forecasts calling for short-term interest rate cuts in the second half of 2027 and an unchanged long-term forecast.

Consistent with other major financial institutions in our coverage, the primary drivers of Bank of America's valuation remain asset growth, the trajectory of its net interest margin, and the continued expansion of its core fee-earning businesses, particularly in wealth management, global banking, and trading.

Digging into the drivers underpinning our forecast of 5.4% annualized growth in fee income over the coming decade, we see a stronger revenue-generating runway in the GWIM segment. Our relatively tepid forecasts for net new asset flows of 2.4% over the upcoming decade, down from 4.1% in the trailing decade, still translate to 7.6% annualized revenue growth when married with our market growth forecasts, as we believe the firm will be able to avoid pronounced fee compression. Further, our revised investment banking and institutional trading forecasts translate to annualized growth rates of 2.7% for each. Though we believe the current backdrop of elevated asset levels and heightened uncertainty as the market continually repositions portfolios due to a rapidly evolving technological landscape, whereby artificial intelligence is developed and proliferated, in addition to heightened levels of global conflict and geopolitical tension, we still struggle to see why trading revenue should structurally outpace the broader economy.

Turning to the balance sheet, we view Bank of America as relatively insulated, even as we forecast that rate cuts will resume in 2027. This resilient posture is primarily due to the firm's outsize exposure to long-duration securities and mortgages, as well as its significant book of low-yield maturities that should be methodically reinvested at higher yields over time. Altogether, we expect net interest income growth of 7.3% in 2026, 7.6% in 2027, and 2.8% in 2028, as the headwinds of a rate cutting cycle beginning in late 2027 should be more than offset by earning asset growth and the redeployment of legacy securities. Further, updated risk weights from the Basel III Endgame re-proposal, particularly within residential real estate, will enable Bank of America to support its lending portfolio with slightly less common equity Tier 1 capital, improving the return profile.

Finally, expenses have been another key concern for Bank of America, particularly as costs rose at an elevated rate in the postpandemic years, though we believe we are in the midst of an inflection point that points to slower expense growth on a go-forward basis as the Cash Pro and Erica platforms transition from development to maintenance mode, culminating in noninterest expenses growing at an annualized rate of 3.8% over the next 10 years. Given our solid revenue growth outlook and cost discipline, we expect Bank of America to beat a 57% long-term efficiency ratio, in line with its moaty bank competitors, despite operating with a significantly higher mix of investment banking and wealth management.

We assign Bank of America a Morningstar Economic Moat Rating of wide, based on durable cost advantages and switching costs across its consumer and commercial banking franchises, in addition to switching costs in its wealth management business. Average returns on tangible common equity, or ROTCE, of 12.8%, relative to our 8.9% estimate cost of equity, over the past decade corroborate our view, despite being weighed down by an ill-timed 2020-21 purchase of long duration held-to-maturity, or HTM, securities. We estimate this depressed the five-year average efficiency ratio and ROTCE by roughly 150 and 160 basis points, respectively, a drag that will continue to fade as the portfolio rolls off and the balance sheet grows.

Bank of America exercises its cost advantages by pulling the operating-efficiency lever rather than the funding-cost lever, generating a particularly strong efficiency ratio despite deposit betas and overall funding costs roughly in line with peers. The firm’s business mix makes traditional efficiency-ratio comparisons imperfect as wealth management, investment banking, and institutional trading generate 46.3% of net revenue, versus 10.2% for our regional banking coverage, but after controlling for mix, we estimate the 2025 efficiency ratio would have been 56.8%, roughly 390 basis points better than our regional average and likely to improve further as the HTM portfolio drag abates. The scale of the enterprise fractionalizes fixed technology, branch, and compliance costs across complementary business lines, evidenced by preprovision net revenue per risk-weighted asset among the highest in our coverage. Further, fee-based businesses like wealth management and investment banking also require less capital than spread-based net interest income, and cross-selling into them via commercial and retail relationships lowers customer acquisition costs.

The consumer banking segment gathers nearly 48% of consolidated deposits, versus 28% of loans, funding higher-yielding lending and securities elsewhere in the franchise. Competition for primary banking relationships is driven more by service quality—fraud prevention, app functionality, branch/ATM proximity—than by yield, and Bank of America has proven adept at winning them. The firm serves as the primary bank for 92% of its consumer clients, and 71% of credit-eligible checking clients hold a Bank of America card, providing valuable payment data to target cross-sell offers at opportune times. Branch and deposit market share within a metro area typically move roughly in tandem until a high-single-digit share threshold, after which deposit growth turns exponential relative to branch growth, driving positive operating leverage, and Bank of America's $566 million in deposits per branch, roughly double our coverage average, reflects this dynamic. On switching costs, just 7% of US banking customers switch primary providers annually, implying a roughly 14-year customer life industrywide, while the firm's rewards-platform clients show a 94% primacy rate and 99% retention, implying a customer life exceeding 20 years even after a material haircut to retention. The segment has generated an 18.6% ROTCE over the past decade, among the strongest in our coverage.

The global wealth & investment management segment holds $2.18 trillion in assets under management and $3.17 trillion in brokerage client assets. Wealth management carries structural, dual-sided switching costs: advisors are reluctant to move because roughly 19% of client assets don't follow them to a new firm (Cerulli Associates), while clients build deep, trust-based relationships with advisors who guide them through market volatility and major life events—retirement, divorce, a business sale, an inheritance—and craft personalized plans around bespoke risk and income needs that make advisor performance particularly difficult to benchmark. We believe relationship pricing across the consolidated platform drives inflows and reinforces the segment’s scale, but our view is slightly tempered by average net new asset flows of a modest 4.1% over the past decade, likely masking meaningful advisor-attrition outflows toward the registered independent channel. Still, the segment has generated a strong 16.6% ROTCE over the past decade.

The global banking segment pairs one of the strongest US commercial banking franchises with a top five investment bank, with commercial relationships serving as a foot in the door for investment-banking deal flow. Cost advantages stem from shared digital infrastructure—cloud, cybersecurity, and data processing—amortized across roughly 70 million consumer and 40,000 corporate clients. For example, the same core security framework and data lake that power digital retail banking also process $450 trillion in annual corporate payments, letting the firm undercut peers that must pay third-party vendors for comparable technology. Switching costs differ by client size. Middle-market clients face workflow lock-in from proprietary portals or feeds embedded in treasury operations, and loss of a data-backed credit history if they leave that results in higher borrowing costs with a new institution. Large corporates face data degradation from bank-specific reconciliation nomenclature and lose the benefits of multicurrency notional pooling and intraday sweeping that only a single-bank ecosystem can provide. The institutional trading business is not stand-alone moatworthy, but it provides product and service options that bolster the commercial and investment banking franchises.

Taken together, we view Bank of America as a wide-moat franchise with durable cost advantages in consumer and global banking and switching costs across consumer banking, global banking, and GWIM, forming an ecosystem whose intersegmental synergies, from cross-sold products to fractionalized fixed costs, make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Increased adoption of CashPro could make it the default choice for middle-market treasurers, providing greater access to operational cash and high-margin fee revenue.

A structural shift in the macroeconomic environment may lead to a prolonged, steeper yield curve, providing a tailwind to net interest income as the bank’s low-yield HTM securities mature.

Increased adoption of Erica for mass affluent wealth and consumer banking clients could lead to even more pronounced operating efficiency improvement.

If the energy spike from early 2026 leads to long-term stagflation, net charge-offs could spike dramatically.

The continued push toward Erica advice for mass affluent clients could decrease migration toward traditional wealth advisors.

Increased proliferation of fintech platforms that pay higher yields on deposits could increase funding costs for all banks even higher than we forecast.