BankAmerica Names New Chief Financial Officer

BankAmerica on Tuesday named John S. Poelker chief financial officer, placing him in a key post as the troubled San Francisco-based bank company struggles to recover after huge 1985 losses.

Poelker, 43, was formerly president and chief financial officer of Citizens & Southern Georgia, a major regional bank based in Atlanta.

The position of chief financial officer at BankAmerica had been held by Chairman Leland S. Prussia, who took over those duties in August, 1984, when Robert Frick was named a vice chairman.

At BankAmerica, parent of the nation’s second-largest bank, Poelker will be charged with modernizing information systems and executing the bank’s financial strategy. He will report directly to President and Chief Executive Samuel H. Armacost.

“John Poelker brings an impressive record of performance and adds depth to our management team,” Armacost said. “He’s a widely respected and broad-gauged financial officer with in-depth experience in financial planning, bank funding, control and management information systems.”

Poelker is credited with helping to engineer a dramatic turnaround at Citizens & Southern in the late 1970s, shortly after he joined the bank. He said that experience will serve him in his new post.

“I see the situation at B of A as being somewhat similar,” he said in a telephone interview. “It has an incredible franchise, strong operations and is in the middle of restructuring its finances and operations.”

He said he was not intimidated by B of A’s size, which is more than 20 times the $5 billion in assets at Citizens & Southern. “Banks are banks. This one just has a few more zeroes behind it.”