[Raebie]

And we’re closing in on the end of 2008. They’re saying this will be done by the end of 2010. I’ll believe that when I see it. It’s going to be a ginormous undertaking. Signage is the least of their worries.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

The advantage will be that they didn't have to spend a lot of their capital for the buy, but where large bank mergers/buyouts take many months for government final approvals, and during that time they already can get to work on figuring out all the integration and rebranding issues, these deals were done soo quickly, I predict the process will take much longer than normal. Also we aren't dealing with a positive economic climate out there for these types of companies, so they are going to have to take it slow and steady.

The Chase/Wamu deal is going to have some serious issues. You basically had two banks with major differences in culture and how they did business. The northeast major banks have had a lot of issues trying to get a large footprint in the west coast, where not only did Wamu do an excellent job in west coast banking, but also went in and pulled it off on the east coast as well which did shock a lot of the established banks there and they saw customers leaving them to go to wamu. Wamu was promoting free checking and had free atms at the time. It really pulled in a lot of customers sick of the nickel and diming they got at banks like Citi and Chase. It worked beautifully.

BofA was already well established on the west coast before moving the majority of its ops to the east coast so it didn't effect them too much. But Chase is one of the most elitist east coast style banks out there. West coasters look upon these banks as places that only the "grey poupon" types bank at because they tend to give a very different level of service in the branches to those who have large accounts, while treating young customers or working class ones like cattle. Chase is going to have to work on its image and advertising to these west coast customers to make it work.

[SlapHappyPappy]

Actually, 2 years is very doable even for a merger of this size. We’ve seen it done before. In fact, it was harder in the past because many of the larger mergers included operations where certain states had separate charters from the primary bank.

The actual hard part will be selling branches in markets where there is too much overlap when it may be possible for other banks to just buy failing banks at a much lower price. I expect there to be a lot of de novo banks founded to take good branches in just this scenario if there are not local/regional banks capable of buying the branches.