Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has a quirky habit hiding in plain sight during his quarterly earnings calls: he deliberately works obscure, old-fashioned words into his prepared remarks. The practice, reported by The Wall Street Journal, is known to only a handful of employees at the bank, who reportedly pick a random word at the last minute for Moynihan to slip in.
An Executive’s Vocabulary Challenge
Moynihan has used terms such as “gainsay” (to dispute or deny), “concomitant” (accompanying), and “fantods” (a state of nervousness) in his public statements. A Bank of America spokesperson described the CEO’s approach to the Journal as playful and intellectually driven, embracing the challenge rather than shying from it.
When Big Words Cause Big Confusion
The unusual diction hasn’t always translated cleanly. During a July call, Moynihan described the Iran war using a word meaning winding or complex. Transcription services diverged wildly in capturing it, variously rendering it as terms meaning “unproductive,” “difficult to manage,” or garbling it into an entirely different phrase. Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo called it an “intellectual flex,” contrasting Moynihan’s style with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s more straightforward communication.
Moynihan, a Brown University history graduate and Notre Dame Law School alum, has led Bank of America since 2010 and joined the company in 2004 through its merger with FleetBoston Financial. The bank’s market capitalization currently stands at $443 billion.