Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 3, 1993                   TAG: 9311030053
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO BANK HAS GONE . . .

The future will see sophisticated automatic machines, perhaps employing virtual reality to interact with customers.

And someday bankers may no longer make corporate loans - a strange development in an industry that historically has been the lender of choice for corporate America.

This is the picture of banking in the 21st century as described by Richard Rosenberg, chairman and chief executive of San Francisco-based BankAmerica Corp., holding company for the nation's second-largest bank.

"This is an incredibly significant period of U.S. banking," Rosenberg told a conference of bank executives sponsored by the trade publication U.S. Banker. "The old order of banking is on the way out."

He supported that idea with a litany of statistics that many in the room found unsettling.

There are 11,300 commercial banks in the United States, down 22 percent from the 14,500 that operated in 1983 - and many of them are unnecessary and will be acquired, Rosenberg said.

Commercial banks make only 15 percent of corporate loans and have a 54 percent share of consumer deposits and mutual fund sales, compared with 84 percent a decade ago.

And banks have only one-fourth of all the country's financial assets. Merrill Lynch & Co., a brokerage firm, has $71 billion in individual retirement accounts, more than the top 100 banks combined, Rosenberg said.

"The banking industry is becoming irrelevant economically and is irrelevant politically," he said.

But individual financial institutions will survive and thrive, even if the current banking industry won't, he predicted.