Now open: The best job on Wall Street

(breakingviews.com) -- What's the best job in financial services? The available chief executive's seat at troubled Bank of America may not spring to mind.

But go beyond a short-term view of the Charlotte-based bank's collection of prime assets, and Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan chief and credit crisis winner, would need to watch his back. There may actually be no better job in finance than the hot-seat at BofA (BAC, Fortune 500).

Right now it's different. Regulators are hardly friendly with BofA or Ken Lewis, its outgoing chief. Its board needs an overhaul, a senior management team of big shots is already in place, and there's huge work to be done integrating its many poorly timed acquisitions.

To cap it all, with government money still invested in the bank, the pay would be low compared with rivals -- at least to start with -- thanks to constraints set by Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's pay tsar.

All that may partly explain the holdup in naming a replacement for Lewis. It's been almost two months since the long-serving chief said he would step down by the end of the year. Even before that, it should have been apparent to the board that his days were numbered, given his battles with regulators and some shareholders.

That BofA's board had no contingency plan highlights one problem a new boss might quickly solve. Though changes have recently been made to their ranks, BofA's directors appear not to have asked tough enough questions of Lewis. Bringing in a more functional and experienced group of directors is a priority for whomever takes the corner office along with BofA's shareholders.

A new face at the top and a revamped board could help turn around another bad situation fairly quickly: the bank's relations with regulators. BofA was tussling with them even before Lewis engaged in a public dispute with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson over whether they put undue pressure on the bank to complete its acquisition of Merrill Lynch at the height of the financial crisis.

If those issues could be addressed quickly, other challenges would take more time. As the board circled the wagons around Lewis, it named a succession of top executives to run the bank's business lines -- including former Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) partner Tom Montag at the investment banking arm and former Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) bigwig Sallie Krawcheck for wealth management and brokerage.

Any new CEO would usually want to shape the executive team. The board's recent recruitment of such heavy hitters -- some of whom may have seen their positions as a stepping stone to one day replacing Lewis -- complicates matters.

Then there's the tricky task of managing BofA as it regains strength while simultaneously folding in Merrill, the country's biggest stockbroker, Countrywide, formerly the biggest mortgage lender in the U.S., and LaSalle, a big retail bank in Chicago. Lewis made all these purchases in the past couple of years and they are still being integrated.

In Merrill's case, for instance, the coming bonus round will be a test of BofA's ability to retain key Merrill employees -- whose payouts last year were controversially guaranteed as part of the acquisition -- while also satisfying its home-grown talent, who did much less well last year.

But here's the thing. Look past these admittedly daunting tasks, and the new BofA boss will preside over a potentially powerful behemoth. With BofA's own banking business combined with LaSalle's, Merrill's investment bank and wealth management operation and Countrywide's home lending franchise, it could more than match Dimon's powerhouse.

Sure, BofA is only expected to make a little over $3 billion in earnings this year, about a third of JPMorgan's (JPM, Fortune 500) bottom line. Go out three years, however, and the picture changes.

Including all the synergies squeezed from its various deals, as badly executed as they might have been, BofA could earn some $40 billion a year, consensus estimates compiled by Reuters suggest. That's 40% more than JPMorgan is expected to earn by then -- and may explain why hedge fund supremo John Paulson has been buying BofA shares.

So aside from the potential monetary rewards of running a giant and by then government-free institution, the next BofA boss could even eclipse Dimon as the top dog on Wall Street. It's hard to imagine what further reason ambitious executives would need to jump at the chance.