Twelve months after the takeover of his bank by Bank of America, Andrea Orcel, the most senior Merrill Lynch banker still at the combined firm, sealed a merger of a different sort at an intimate ceremony in Rome where he married his girlfriend of 16 years last week.

The event was the culmination of a good week for Orcel. Days before the wedding, which was described by one source as "close family and friends, and Greg Fleming (his former boss at Merrill Lynch and now a lecturer at Yale Law School)", Orcel picked up his latest and biggest promotion, when he was named as executive chairman of global banking and markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.