Here at Corporate Dealmaker, we've been doing a lot of reporting lately on the avalanche of post-merger integration issues facing executives of merging banks. One of the biggies, particularly for commercial banks, is getting their IT systems talking. This is typically a timely, expensive and complex process.
So we were surprised to see that customers of the newly merged J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Washington Mutual Inc. can now
withdraw cash from any of the bank's 14,000 ATMs nationwide.
J.P. Morgan bought the banking assets of WaMu for $1.9 billion on Sept. 25. And, according to the company, customers will soon be able to make deposits at ATMs and do their banking at any of the combined organization's 5,400 bank branches as computer systems are converted.
That last bit is no easy task. Just ask Bank of America Corp. chief executive Ken Lewis. In the mid-1990s, Lewis was president of the retail division of NationsBank, which bought BankAmerica Corp. for about $65 billion in 1998 to create Bank of America. NationsBank was coming off a string of a dozen acquisitions, and Lewis was charged with getting those banks operating on a single technology platform. You can read the details
here, but the conversion was expensive, fraught with problems, and the bank lost market share as a result.
By making the transition to new systems and services seamless for customers -- and better yet, making banking more convenient -- J.P. Morgan may help avert defections during uncertain times. Of course, at a time when uncertainty reigns, sticking with what they know might seem like a pretty good option for customers as well.
- Suzanne Stevens
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