Wendy Stewart

The incoming questions from Wendy Stewart's middle-market corporate banking clients this spring was universally similar. Across industrial, marketplace and geographical settings, companies were asking about strategies surrounding trade, tariffs, inflation, interest rates and even immigration, in the wake of recessionary worries ramping up across both Wall Street and Main Street.  

"I'm hearing a lot of things that start with a 't' or an 'i'," said Stewart, the Atlanta-based president of Bank of America's Global Commercial Banking unit. "We started off the year expecting to go in one direction, and it clearly went in a very different direction."

But under Stewart's direction, the bank's commercial banking services continued to attract and maintain American businesses' confidence, gaining 8% year-over-year growth in middle-market loans and a 15% gain in deposits to over $600 billion. This follows similarly strong results in 2024 that saw 4% annual growth in loans and 6% t in deposits, from companies in 115 U.S. and Canadian cities (plus another 15 international markets) with between $50 million and $2 billion in yearly revenues.