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Amadeo Pietro Giannini (1870-1949), born in San Jose, California, was the founder of Bank of America.

Giannini's parents were Italian, from Liguria near Genoa, immigrants to the United States. He attended Heald College in San Francisco, California. Giannini opened the Bank of Italy in a former San Francisco saloon on 17 October 1904. Deposits on that first day totaled $8,780. An early difficulty to overcome was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. However, the earthquake actually helped Giannini gain something of a loan monopoly. After the earthquake, he moved the vault's money to his home outside the fire zone in then-rural San Mateo, an 18-mile drive by horse and wagon. The raging fires severely heated the vaults of other big banks which had the money in them. Opening them immediately would ruin the money, so they had to be kept closed for weeks. Because of this, Giannini was one of the few who was able to provide loans at the time. Giannini was forced to run his bank from a plank across two barrels in the street for a time. Giannini made loans on a handshake to anyone who was interested in rebuilding. Years later, he would recount with pride that every single loan was repaid.

By 1916 Giannini had expanded and opened several other branches. In 1928, Giannini approached Orra E. Monnette, President and Chairman of the Bank of America, Los Angeles about a merger of the two financial institutions. Upon finalizing the merger, Giannini and Monnette concurred that the Bank of America name idealized the broader mission of the new bank. The new institution continued under Giannini's chairmanship until his retirement in 1945; Monnette retained his Board seat and Officer's position. Prior to Monnette's creation of the Bank of America Los Angeles network, most banks were limited to a single city or region. By diversifying the scope of community that the BoA served following its merger, the institution was better prepared to ride out minor, local economic issues.

Giannini is credited as the inventor of many modern banking practices. Most notably, Giannini was one of the first bankers to offer banking services to middle-class Americans, rather than simply the upper class.

A liberal in a conservative field, Giannini and his bank helped nurture the motion picture and wine industries in California. He loaned Walt Disney the funds to produce "Snow White", the first full length animated motion picture. In the depths of the Depression, he bought the bonds that financed the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. During World War II, he bankrolled industrialist Henry Kaiser and his enterprises which supported the War effort. After the War, he visited Italy and arranged for loans to help rebuild the war-torn Fiat factories.

Giannini founded another company, Transamerica Corporation, as a holding company for his various interests, including Occidental Life Insurance Company. At one time, Transamerica was the controlling shareholder in Bank of America. They were separated by legislation enacted by the U.S. Congress to thwart Giannini's ambitions.

Upon Giannini's death in 1949, his son Mario Giannini, who had been afflicted with polio in his youth, took over leadership of the Bank, and Giannini's daughter, Claire Giannini Hoffman, took her father's seat on the Bank's Board of Directors--one of the first women bank directors in the nation, where she remained until the 1980s. Giannini is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, CA.

The large plaza of the Bank of America Building at California Street and Kearny in downtown San Francisco is named for Giannini, as is a middle school in San Francisco, the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural economics, and the building that houses the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

The U.S. Postal Service honored Giannini's contributions to American banking by issuing a postage stamp bearing his portrait in 1973. A ceremony to mark the occasion was held near his former home in San Mateo, CA.

TIME Magazine named A. P. Giannini one of the "builders and titans" of the twentieth century. He was the only banker so named to this distinguished list of the 100 most important people of the century.

American Banker Magazine recognized him as one of the five most influential bankers of the twentieth century.

In 2004, the Italian government honored Giannini with an exhibition and ceremony in Parliament to mark the centennial of his founding of the Bank of Italy. The exhibition was the result of the collaboration of the Ministry of Finance, the Smithsonian Institution, Italian Professor Guido Crapanzano and Peter F. De Nicola, an American collector of Giannini memorabilia.

• Time Magazine profile of Amadeo Giannini
• A.P. Giannini website

The Literary Digest reported: "According to his office it has been Americanized to jee-a-nin'ee. This brought abusive protests from readers who denounced our ignorance of Italian." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)