Bank of America Corp plans to reduce its $850 billion portfolio of troubled home loans by about half over the next three years, the bank's new mortgage unit head told the Financial Times.

The bank looks to do this as it seeks to quickly resolve problems related to the housing crisis and the purchase of Countrywide Financial, the paper said.

Last month, Bank of America posted an unexpectedly sharp drop in first-quarter profit as higher expenses from delayed home foreclosures weighed on its mortgage business.

BofA's Terry Laughlin was asked to tackle the growing number of bad loans that impact the bank's overall performance, the Financial Times reported.

We are isolating the problems and quickly identifying the resources we need to fix them, Laughlin told the Financial Times.

Bank of America said in March it did not expect its mortgage business to return to normal earnings until 2014 or later, while most of its other businesses could recover by 2013.

Laughlin wants to streamline the modification process, under which borrowers are typically offered lower monthly payments for a period, to better handle the high number of delinquencies, the daily said.

(Reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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