Bank of America to Launch
                   Service for Online Business

                   By RICK BROOKS
                   Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

                   Bank of America Corp., in a move aimed at encouraging small business to
                   jump onto the Internet, is expected to announce Tuesday a service that lets
                   companies build an online store through the nation's second-largest bank.

                   The move thrusts the Charlotte, N.C., bank into competition with a
                   number of financial-services firms and other companies scrambling to
                   capture the burgeoning flow of electronic orders and payments from small
                   businesses eager to establish a virtual storefront. Bank of America's rivals
                   will range from the new zShops section of Amazon.com Inc.'s heavily
                   trafficked Web site to Wells Fargo & Co., a San Francisco bank that
                   launched its One-Stop eStore for small businesses last month.

                   "If we don't do this for them, they will go somewhere else," Sharif Bayyari,
                   president and chief executive officer of Bank of America's
                   merchant-services unit, said.

                   Bank of America's biggest potential advantage as it rolls out the service,
                   called Internet Order Center, is its huge base of about two million business
                   customers, more than any other U.S. bank. Bank officials are considering
                   promoting companies that sign up for the service to almost 20 million
                   retail-banking customers with its credit cards.

                   Bank of America said it will collect a fee of $100 a month from merchants
                   who use the service to track inventory, generate shipping information and
                   authorize customer payments, as well as a small transaction fee every time
                   a credit card is used to make a purchase. The bank also can build a
                   merchant's Web site from scratch for as little as about $250. "In effect, I'm
                   getting an entire finance department," said Steve Owens, owner of
                   Meadow Wood Group Inc., a Rancho Mirage, Calif., hockey-stick seller
                   that has been using the Web-based service for about three weeks.

                   With competition growing fierce, analysts said Bank of America's
                   Web-based service is likely to succeed only if it can avoid technological
                   glitches as it grows. Andrew Efstathiou, a senior analyst at Yankee Group,
                   a research firm in Boston, said the bank is exposing itself to a
                   public-relations risk because its name and logo will appear on each
                   participating merchant's Web site. "If [the bank's] brand name is out in
                   front and it's the merchant's fault, it will adversely impact [the bank's]
                   brand image," he said.