Merrill’s Bull to Stick Around After BoA Acquisition

Bank of America issued a memo today, in which it announced that Merrill Lynch & Co.’s bull logo will be a symbol of the combined Bank of America and Merrill Lynch financial advisory business, called Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

The corporate, commercial, investment banking, and capital markets businesses, however, will be branded “Bank of America Merrill Lynch” and will use Bank of America’s “flagscape” logo.

The memo also said the names of U.S. Trust, a private wealth management unit for high net worth clients, and the mutual fund unit Columbia Management will remain.

The logo announcement comes shortly after the acquisition was finalized and the week after two high-ranking Merrill executives departed. Robert McCann, the vice chairman of the wealth management division at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., resigned and was replaced by Dan Sontag, a deputy who oversees Merrill’s brokerage operations in the U.S. and Latin America, reports said (see “McCann Exits Merrill after Bank of America Takeover’). Later in the week, it was announced that Gregory Fleming, former president and chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch & Co., left Bank of America to join Yale Law School’s faculty (see “BoA Loses another Ex-Merrill Exec’).