From a pushcart he built one of the world's largest financial services corporations. From great tragedy he forged opportunity while reaching out to help others. Along the way, with luck, determination and dauntless confidence he overcame obstacles and forged a simple ethic: wealth comes with a responsibility to improve society.
None of it was easy. None of it happened overnight. But today, Amadeo Peter Giannini is recognized as the father of modern consumer banking. His persistence in innovation and respect for the common citizen gave the world its finest example of banking with a conscience.
Giannini was born in California’s Santa Clara Valley to Italian immigrant parents. Like many immigrant kids of that time he had to be put to work to help provide for the family. Consequently, he left school at age thirteen to work with his stepfather in the produce business.
Giannini's instincts were good and he was blessed with a first rate mind. As he grew up, he saw firsthand that established banks refused to serve ordinary people, especially the large Italian immigrant population. In response to inequity, rather than complain Giannini took action, opening the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904 as an institution for the “little fellows.” After the earthquake and fire of 1906, his bank, the only one to survive the catastrophe with all its assets intact, was the first to reopen. Giannini went full throttle providing the loans needed to help countless small businesses rebuild. This helped San Francisco rise from the ashes by making loans “on a face and a signature” to the these business owners whose lives were shattered.
Addressing the financial needs of the underrepresented in rural areas as well as cities, the Bank of Italy opened branches throughout California, becoming the first statewide branch-banking system in the United States. By the mid-1920s, Giannini’s strategy of serving common people had made his bank the third largest in the country. Renamed the Bank of America in 1930, it withstood the Great Depression and provided the financial horsepower to build the Golden Gate Bridge, develop Hollywood’s movie industry, and nourish the state’s agricultural development and wine and aerospace industries. Clearly, Giannini was a visionary who saw beyond the problems of the present day to the possibilities that would fulfill the American dream.
And Giannini never forget the less fortunate citizens that he set out to serve. In 1928, he created the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California, which supports the world’s foremost agricultural economics library and funds leading-edge research in agriculture, water, and forestry. In 1945, he created the Bank of America-Giannini Foundation to promote medical research into the discovery, treatment and care of diseases.
Giannini changed the face of banking forever, and directly or indirectly, virtually every American alive today has benefited from his success. Indeed, Bank of America is now a worldwide financial institution with assets of more than three trillion dollars!
H/T: California Museum
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