The primary sticking point wasn't that the companies had different strengths, but that they had built up different cultures to play to those strengths. A midlevel manager from the Fleet side says her bank ''was the more disciplined of the two'' before the merger. A former senior executive at BankBoston, who now works across town at another bank, said Gifford made an honest effort to involve employees in the decision-making process. The bank was famous for holding ''town meetings,'' for example, in which executives briefed employees on strategy and answered questions. Fleet, on the other hand, was known for being a top-down organization in which managers passed orders from one level to the next.
Analysts seem to agree.
Bush said that her initial fears have proved to be unfounded, and that she is surprised at how smoothly the change appears to have gone. Gifford, though, played down suggestions that his influence is directly responsible for a cultural shift or for the bank's apparent new direction. As for the new customer-centered public persona, Murray said it has more to do with the fact that Fleet finally is stepping off the acquisition treadmill than anything else. The dogged focus on mergers and cost-cutting for the past 15 years has disrupted customer service and hurt Fleet's reputation, he said. But Jack Sidell, the former head of USTrust Co. and more recently the director of relationship banking at Capital Crossing Bank, said the differences in how Fleet and BankBoston traditionally treated customers ran deeper than that.