(Bloomberg) -- It’s been a turbulent ride for Bank of America Corp.’s equities unit, with personnel strife and a leadership change in the midst of the pandemic’s market swings. Yet as executives tallied last year’s performance, a minor miracle emerged: The business, under new division chief Soofian Zuberi, held its largest competitors at bay.

The unit posted a 19% jump in revenue that not only preserved its market share but winnowed the gap with the firm’s much larger fixed-income division to the narrowest on record. It was a surprisingly smooth landing for a stocks business that had faced public scrutiny of its hard-driving culture in 2020, frustrations over pay and a raft of defections.

On recent conference calls, Bank of America Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan has lauded the progress being made by “Soofian” and “Jim” -- the firm’s global head of markets, Jim DeMare. In the ultimate mark of trust, the bank’s leaders allocated more capital last year to expand the equities sales and trading team.

It’s a bet that Zuberi’s more diplomatic touch can bring stability and growth to a unit that’s never quite matched up to the size of the country’s second-largest bank. His predecessor, longtime stocks chief Fabrizio Gallo, was known to push his team hard and drew attention in 2020 after nudging staffers to come into the office while Covid-19 infection rates were surging in New York.

Tales of Zuberi’s style, in contrast, recount how the Pakistani-American banker showed up with a colleague at an employee’s home to talk him out of defecting to a competitor. In another, he shipped a cake to express gratitude to a subordinate’s mother, who was so impressed she forbid her son from ever quitting.

In an interview, Zuberi downplayed his own role in the division’s performance last year.

“We streamlined the organization to seize the market opportunity we saw,” the 50-year-old said. He credited the company’s investments in talent and technology.

People with knowledge of Zuberi’s ascent and management style agreed to speak for this story on the condition they not be named discussing personnel or behind-the-scenes interactions.

Running a risk-taking markets desk at Bank of America is a special balancing act: the lender isn’t so fond of risk. Moynihan, who spent much of his first decade atop the company cleaning up messes from the 2008 financial crisis, has made “responsible growth” a mantra touching virtually every business line.

“Responsible growth drives client selection, who we do business with and how” in the equities unit, Zuberi said. “In trading, it determines how much risk we want to have, and what can we do to stay nimble to the extent market conditions change.” 

Some clients grumble over the bank’s reluctance to engage in potentially hairy deals. Rivals smirk at the opportunities it passes up. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, which have smaller balance sheets, operate franchises that routinely overshadow Bank of America’s haul.

Yet as equities trading picked up on Wall Street last year, Bank of America’s division kept pace with the industry’s growth, posting a record $6.4 billion in revenue.

Zuberi reached the top of the division in back-to-back leadership moves that began in the middle of 2020, when he was elevated to split the role with Gallo, his longtime boss.

Gallo, like Bank of America’s investment bank chief Thomas Montag, was known for his hands-on involvement in operations and a blunt management style. Months after Gallo was made to share his duties, he announced his surprise departure, leaving Zuberi -- a then-25-year company insider known for a softer tone -- as the sole head.

Zuberi, too, comes from the long-hours, no-excuses tradition of investment banking. But he takes some care in setting workplace precedents. People with knowledge of his habits say he often drafts emails at 2 a.m., but holds off on sending them until 7.

Raised in Libya, Zuberi attended the Oil Companies School, now known as International School of Martyrs. He moved to the U.S. in the 1990s and studied at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating with a degree in economics. Every incoming student at the liberal-arts school was required to read Homer’s “The Iliad.” Friends say he can still quote from the epic poem.

Desperate not to return home, Zuberi dialed dozens of recruiters for a job in the finance industry. He bought a suit he couldn’t afford from Nordstrom for his interviews, with the intention of returning it for a refund. After Merrill Lynch gave him his first paycheck in finance, he went back and bought another suit.

Zuberi started as a corporate financial analyst and eventually picked up his masters of business administration from Harvard. He worked at its equity capital-markets group in Hong Kong and later ran fixed-income sales for the Asia-Pacific region. Zuberi joined Bank of America through its acquisition of Merrill during the global financial crisis.

Zuberi’s deputies include Glenn Koh, head of global equities trading, and Orly Avidan, head of global equities distribution. Avidan was promoted around the same time as Zuberi, becoming one of the most senior women at the bank, and is now part of the management team for global equities.

The company’s broader European business had also seen a series of shakeups, with Martina Slowey named to run equities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, replacing Julien Bahurel in 2020. That change followed the earlier departure of Andrew Mitchell, head of equities trading in the region. Olivier Thiriet is head of equities for the Asia-Pacific region, where the firm aims to grow its franchise.

Montag retired from the investment bank last year. At an investor conference in September, Moynihan lauded the markets division run by DeMare, 52, and explained the decision to make more capital available.

“The equities team under Soofian has done a great job of building,” the CEO said. “We feel good about what they’ve done.”

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