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Bank of America CEO earns $20m in 2016
By Laura J. Kellerand Anders Melin
Bloomberg News

Bank of America Corp. awarded its chief executive officer, Brian T. Moynihan, $20 million for his work last year, raising his compensation by 25 percent.

Moynihan received $18.5 million in stock grants for 2016, and the board left his salary unchanged at $1.5 million, according to a regulatory filing on Friday. A year earlier, the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank gave him a $16 million pay package, reflecting a raise of 23 percent. Moynihan hasn’t received a cash bonus since 2007.

Moynihan, 57, has worked to boost the lender’s profitability through cost reductions and by resolving litigation issues left over from the financial crisis. He increased profit by 13 percent to $17.9 billion in 2016, and said in April he would cap expenses at $53 billion by the end of 2018, a $2 billion drop from last year.

Despite dialing back costs, Moynihan didn’t achieve his long-term, 60-percent efficiency ratio target in 2016. Bank of America, the second-largest US lender, ended the year with a 65-percent ratio of non-interest expense to net income, an improvement from 69 percent in 2015.

The firm also hasn’t achieved its 12-percent target for return on tangible common equity, which remained below 10 percent to end 2016.

Bank of America shares climbed 31 percent in 2016, the most among the largest US deposit-taking lenders. The surge was due largely to a fourth-quarter rally in financial stocks fueled by investor expectations that Donald Trump’s election would result in less regulation and lower taxes.