[serious] why do (mostly) bofa employees insist on calling it baml?

was on linkedin today and I came across a few interns all saying they work at baml. didn't they do a name change? Seems like it's all in the mind of recent college graduate that rather say they work at Bank of America Merrill Lynch versus BOA, because they are afraid that people will accidentally mistaken them as working in one of the branches. With that said as toolish as it sounds, I do think branding does have an implicit impact on people's psychology & how people relate to your firm, and it's not for a league tables thing. In New York, telling someone you work at Credit Suisse has a stronger cachet than BOFA because US people associate CS with the "high finance" investment bank and if you say BOFA first assumption is that you open checking accounts & credit cards for a living. . Thoughts?

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Will update my computer soon and leave Incognito so I will disappear forever. How did I achieve Neanderthal by trolling? Some people are after me so need to close account for safety.
 

People that worry about this sucks more dick than the guys that have cringe LinkedIn profiles.

 
"loanboy043" I think it’s just what they’re used to and what they grew up saying.

They wanted to be BofA analysts as soon as they met the friendly clerk at their local BofA branch when they were being potty trained.

Will update my computer soon and leave Incognito so I will disappear forever. How did I achieve Neanderthal by trolling? Some people are after me so need to close account for safety.
 

Truth be told, I keep referring to it as BAML just to piss off the guy who keeps correcting people in every thread

 

My dad is an MD at a MM financing place that competes against BofA all the time and he’s never referred to them as BAML, always BofA. However, some of his brokerage accounts were opened with ML and we receive monthly statements/prospectuses from ML in the mail that don’t include the Bank of America name whatsoever.

 
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Same reason some people still call the Citi trading operation "Salomon" or a few people refer to PJT as "Blackstone" (have heard both) - either they are 30 year veterans and are referring to a specific group of people they have always called "X", or they are interns who want to impress.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125417931158647695

It is interesting though, this seems to only work for mergers that went well. No one calls the 3 or 4 top BarCap groups Lehman - even though many MDs still have LB business cards in their desk. Same thing with CS/DLJ (that may have been cuz most DLJ talent left, though one time I had a professor call it First Boston- no CSFB, just "First Boston").

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