高中英语 美国银行业的下一个危机？ Next Crisis For US Banks作文素材

On Monday afternoon, Donovan McKitty walked into a TD Bank branch around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange to make a deposit. The teller looked at his checking-account number, then slipped into a back room where another employee processed the deposit on a different computer.
About half of parent TD Bank Financial Group's 1,075 branches on the East Coast have two computer systems that can't talk to each other. That is because the Toronto company bought Commerce Bancorp Inc., of Cherry Hill, N.J., in March, but won't fully integrate the combined bank's branches until September. (Please see related article on page C5.)
Few things in banking are as ho-hum as the back-office operations that handle billions of deposits, withdrawals and other transactions every day. But with acquisition activity intensifyin g, such systems are about to face a huge test.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. are spending hundreds of millions of dollars during the next few years to integrate their recent purchases of Washington Mutual Inc.'s banking operations, Wachovia Corp. and National City Corp., respectively.
Those six banks hold about 22% of the nation's $7 trillion deposit base. In addition to merging computer networks, some branches will be closed and others will get a new look. Millions of customers also will see changes to debit cards and online banking.
'We haven't seen anything like this in at least 10 years,' says Brad Strothkamp, a
retail-banking analyst at consulting firm Forrester Research Inc., referring to the number of massive integrations that will occur simultaneously.
Any significant stumbles will create headaches for retail-banking customers at a time when many are rattled by failures, near-failures and dwindling profits at banks across the U.S.
The job of combining two banks is notoriously expensive, complicat ed and risky. It took J.P. Morgan, an amalgamation of more than 200 banks, about 17 years to fully merge the operations of Texas Commerce Bancshares Inc., which the New York bank bought in 1988.
About 20% of the customers acquired by First Union Corp. in the 1998 takeover of CoreStates Financial Corp. defected, with many frustrated by technical glitches in their accounts. First Union, of Charlotte, N.C., bought the former Wachovia in 2001, adopted its name and spent years trying to rebuild its customer-service reputation.
NationsBank Corp., the predecessor to Bank of America Corp., lost a big chunk of market share in Florida after its 1998 purchase of Barnett Banks Inc. Integration snags resulted in long lines and lousy service. Despite its proclivity for large deals, Bank of America still uses a separate computer plat form in California a decade after the deal that created the Charlotte, N.C., company. California customers who want to make a deposit at a branch in Chicago or New York City must use an 'out-of-state' deposit slip.
J.P. Morgan executives are racing to absorb the former WaMu by the end of 2009. Hundreds of WaMu branches in overlapping markets such as Chicago will be closed in the next few months.
Until the computer systems are merged, J.P. Morgan will set up separate teller lines for WaMu customers in some of its own branches in those common markets. The Seattle thrift collapsed in September in the largest-ever U.S. failure of a bank or thrift.
Wells Fargo has disclosed few details about its plans for folding Wachovia into the San Francisco bank, but the process is expected to take three years. That deal was completed Dec.
31.
Pittsburgh-based PNC is training employees to explain to National City customers in cities where both banks have branches, including Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, that they can't conduct any banking business in PNC branches yet.
'The worst thing that could happen is i f our employees think they can take those deposits,' say s Joseph Guyaux, who runs PNC's consumer businesses. PNC, which completed its $5 billion purchase of National City last week, plans to begin overhauling the Cleveland bank's branches this fall.
TD began handling transactions by hand from its entire customer base at the combined bank's branches wi thin days of the Commerce deal's completion. About half those locations were merged into one computer system in November.
TD still uses a second system in those branches to handle customers like Mr. McKitty, who opened his account at a Pou ghkeepsie, N.Y., branch of TD Banknorth about a decade ago. That is the longtime name of TD's bank unit in the U.S., but it will be phased out this fall.
'Could it have been a nightmare? Absolutely,' says Linda Verba, who runs TD's retail operations in the mid-Atlantic region. 'But it got us closer to doing a big-bang system conversion and working out the bugs before we pulled the switch.'
The extra legwork di dn't bother Mr. McKitty, a 53-year-old reggae musician who rode his bicycle across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to the TD branch. 'I hadn't used this account in a year, and I just need to keep my balance up,' he said.。