MIT Media Lab and Bank of America Announce Center for Future Banking

The MIT Media Laboratory and Bank of America today announced the
creation of the Center for Future Banking, a five-year collaboration
to which Bank of America has committed $3-5 million annually.

"Bank of America is investing in the future of banking. Working
with the MIT Media Lab provides a unique opportunity to grow banking
in innovative ways that respond to evolving customer behavior,
preferences, and trends," said Anne Finucane, Chief Marketing Officer,
Bank of America.

The new research center, which will be located at the Media Lab on
the MIT campus, will serve as an innovation engine that will seek to
transform the ways banking will be conducted in a world of rapidly
changing social, economic, and information landscapes.

The Center will explore new ideas in banking by inventing
technologies that reveal and leverage insights across a wide range of
physical and social scales, from one-on-one customer interactions to
global transactions. Researchers will address such questions as: "How
can every customer be empowered with the knowledge and tools to take
better control of their financial futures?" "How will banking
interactions evolve as a customer´s physical and virtual worlds become
completely intertwined?" and "How will social networks and mobile
platforms transform customers´ banking experiences, making it easier,
more convenient, and better integrated with their daily lives?".

Frank Moss, Director of the Media Lab and holder of the Jerome
Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences, believes the Center
for Future Banking represents a powerful new model by which academia
and business will partner to invent the future of entire industries.
According to Moss, "We are bringing together the creative,
multidisciplinary research of Media Lab faculty and students with the
real-world business experience and deep-domain knowledge of our Bank
of America colleagues-all in a highly innovative environment that
promotes unconventional thinking and risk-taking. In doing so, we hope
not only to discover the principles that will transform banking in the
next decade, but also to advance our basic understanding of the
rapidly changing relationship between people, technology, and society
in the twenty-first century."

"Bank of America has long been recognized as a leader in creating
innovative products and solutions for customers, such as our
award-winning online banking, mobile banking, and Keep the Change
savings program," said Susan Faulkner, Deposits & Student Lending
Executive, Bank of America. "We believe that the results of this
collaboration will have long-range significance to change the face of
banking as our customers know it."

Professor Deb Roy, Chair of MIT´s academic program in Media Arts
and Sciences and a pioneer in cognitive modeling, communication
theory, and human-machine interaction, will serve as the Center´s
Founding Director and Principal Investigator. "The Center sets the
stage for potentially path-breaking research that will tap into core
Media Lab capabilities and extend them in exciting new directions,"
says Roy. "We will create a focus of intellectual energy that brings
together researchers with radically different perspectives, including
behavioral economists, social scientists, computer scientists,
psychologists, designers, and others who share a passion for
invention. It´s a recipe for producing unexpected new ideas that will
trigger significant innovations in the world of banking."

About the MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to
envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday
life-technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most
basic notions of human capabilities. Unconstrained by traditional
disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work
atelier-style in some 30 research groups conducting more than 400
projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to
developing the city car of the future. Lab researchers foster a unique
culture of learning by doing, developing technologies that empower
people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all societies, to
design and invent new possibilities for themselves and their
communities. For more information about the Center for Future Banking:
http://cfb.media.mit.edu; for information on the Media Lab:
http://www.media.mit.edu.

About Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)

Bank of America is one of the world´s largest financial
institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market
businesses, and large corporations with a full range of banking,
investing, asset management, and other financial and risk-management
products and services. In the United States, the company serves more
than 59 million consumer and small business relationships with more
than 6,100 retail banking offices, nearly 19,000 ATMs, and
award-winning online banking with nearly 24 million active users. Bank
of America is the No. 1 overall Small Business Administration (SBA)
lender in the United States and the No. 1 SBA lender to minority-owned
small businesses. The company serves clients in 175 countries and has
relationships with 99 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies and 83
percent of the Fortune Global 500. Member FDIC.
http://www.bankofamerica.com.