Wachovia

They also sponsor the following teams:. Zidane can refer to:. In addition to the venues in Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Wachovia also sponsors an annual PGA tournament in Charlotte, called the Wachovia Championship. Zidane Tribal, protagonist of the computer game Final Fantasy IX. Interestingly, Capital One was originally established as the credit card division of Signet Bank, which was later purchased by First Union prior to the Wachovia merger. Zinédine Zidane, Real Madrid and French footballer. This purchase would give Wachovia an established credit card division, plus allow it to establish (via Capital One's purchase of Hibernia National Bank) a banking presence in Louisiana and strengthen its presence in Texas.

Nevertheless, speculation remains that Wachovia may buy Capital One. As of 2006, new credit card accounts opened through Wachovia will remain with this new division. On November 2, 2005 Wachovia announced that it would end its credit card relationship with MBNA and start up its own credit card division. The payment is part of the agreement Wachovia predecessor First Union made in 2000 when it sold its credit card portfolio to MBNA.

Multiple sources have reported that as part of its agreement with Wachovia, MBNA is required to pay the nine-figure sum if it ever sells to Wachovia's cross-town rival Bank of America. Wachovia is set to get $100 million out of this deal. Within a week of the deal's collapse, MBNA entered into an agreement to be purchased by Wachovia's chief rival, Bank of America. However, the deal fell through when Wachovia balked at MBNA's purchase price.

In June of 2005, Wachovia negotiated to purchase monoline credit card company MBNA. This purchase will give Wachovia 19 branches in Southern California, but more importantly, will more than double the size of Wachovia's dealer financial services business, making it the nation's ninth largest auto loan originator. Wachovia will enter the California market with its purchase of Western Financial Bank. The merger created the largest bank in the southeast, the fourth largest bank in the United States in terms of holdings, and the second largest in terms of number of branches.

On November 1, 2004, Wachovia completed the acquisition of banking competitor SouthTrust Corporation, a transaction valued at $14.3 billion. It also operates Wachovia Securities, its brokerage services subsidiary. It has banking centers in 15 East coast states and Washington, D.C. Wachovia is currently ranked number 23 on the Forbes 500 list for 2003, and is the fourth largest bank holding company in the US.

Formerly known as the First Union Center and the First Union Spectrum (both Philadelphia) and First Union Arena (Wilkes-Barre), they are now known as the Wachovia Center, Wachovia Spectrum, and Wachovia Arena. The merger also affected the names of the indoor professional sports arenas in Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Charlotte, North Carolina's One, Two, Three, and Four First Union buildings became One, Two, Three, and Four, Wachovia Center (respectively), and the 55-story First Union Tower in downtown Miami became the Wachovia Tower. When Wachovia and First Union merged, the multiple skyscrapers with First Union's name came under Wachovia's name.

The company has also been reporting record revenues since the merger. In addition, the company's stock price has remained strong, and provided a good return to legacy Wachovia shareholders, in contrast to SunTrust's claims during the takeover attempt. In fact, Wachovia has been ranked number one in customer satisfaction every year since the merger. The company's slow strategy to combine seems to have prevented large customer attrition rates.

In comparison the CoreStates purchase, the merger of First Union and Wachovia has been a huge success. This process officially ended on August 18, 2003, almost 2 years after the merger took place. The company first began converting systems in the Southeast United States (where both banks had branches) before moving to the Northeast, where First Union branches only had to change their signs to reflect the new company name and logo. Over a period of several years, legacy Wachovia computer systems were converted to First Union systems.

In order to prevent a repeat of the CoreStates fiasco, the new Wachovia took a deliberately long period of time to combine the banking operations of the new company. On September 4, 2001, First Union and Wachovia officially merged to form the new Wachovia Corporation. Wachovia paid Bank One a $350 million termination fee. After entering into negotiations, the new Wachovia agreed to buy back its portfolio from Bank One in September of 2001 and resell it to MBNA.

First Union sold their credit card portfolio to MBNA in August of 2000. The cards, which would have still been branded as Wachovia, would have been issued through Bank One's First USA division. In April of 2001, Wachovia agreed to sell its $8 billon credit card portfolio to Bank One. Another problem concerned each banks' credit card divisions.

They rejected SunTrust's attempts to elect a new Board of Directors for Wachovia, and thus, ended SunTrust's hostile takeover. On August 3, 2001, Wachovia shareholders approved the First Union deal. Long a rumored suitor for Wachovia, SunTrust had been in on-again off-again merger talks with it over the course of many years, with both Wachovia and SunTrust eventually confirming the most recent effort took place during the winter of 2000 before Wachovia terminated the discussions. In its effort to make the "Smoke-and-Coke" deal appeal to investors, SunTrust argued that it would provide a smoother transition than First Union and offered a higher cash price for Wachovia stock than First Union.

On May 14, 2001, Atlanta-based SunTrust announced a rival takeover bid for Wachovia, the first hostile takeover attempt in the banking sector in many years. First Union responded to these concerns by placing the wealth management and Carolinas-region headquarters in Winston-Salem. The city of Winston-Salem was concerned both by job losses by the move and the loss of stature from losing a corporation. Citizens and politicians of Winston-Salem suffered from a hurt of their civic pride because the city would lose Wachovia's corporate headquarters to Charlotte, partly because Winston-Salem is a much smaller city than Charlotte.

Analysts were concerned of First Union's ability to merge with another large company because of the CoreStates deal. The deal was met with criticism and doubt by several groups. At the same time, Wachovia's name and corporate identity would survive, an important source of pride to Wachovia's board. Analysts said this move was most likely to help First Union acquire a new identity, as Wachovia's reputation was far better with consumers than First Union.

As an important part of the deal, First Union would shed its name and assumed the Wachovia identity and stock ticker. The former CEO of Wachovia, Bud Baker, later said that he and First Union's CEO, Ken Thompson, met at interstate motels to keep their talks of merger as secret as possible. While Wachovia had been viewed as an acquisition candidate after running into problems with earnings and credit quality in 2000, the suitor shocked analysts as most assumed that should Wachovia be sold it would be to SunTrust in the long-assumed "Smoke-and-Coke" merger (the nickname coming from Wachovia's long relationship with tobacco companies and SunTrust's holdings of Coke stock dating from Coke's initial public offering). This was viewed with great surprise by the financial press and security analysts.

Although the merger was billed in the proxy as a merger of equals by pooling, the deal was actually a purchase of Wachovia by First Union. On April 16, 2001, Charlotte-based First Union Corporation announced it would merge with Winston-Salem-based Wachovia Corporation. This is very ironic since the company weasled the judge into believing that the legitimate owner had no interest in the domain name, but Wachovia did. As of this writing, the domain name is owned by Wachovia, but is not being used.

Recently, Wachovia has sued for and obtained several domain names of sites warning people about Wachovia, including wachovia-sucks.com. However, the company has taken steps to silence anyone who gives an honest opinion of the bank. First Union, now Wachovia, has proceeded to trash the Wachovia named. This tactic is similiar to ValueJet renaming itself after it killed a plane full of passengers to make an extra buck by carying volatile materials.

Unfortunately for First Union's customers, the bank itself had not change. First Union found a far small bank that had a good reputation, and proceeded to purchase it in order to cover up its past. The reputation was so bad that the company felt that it had to abandon its brand name and acquire a new one. First Union had a terrible reputation for incompetence and fraud.

In 2000, legacy Wachovia made its final purchase, which was Republic Security Bank, giving its first entry into Florida. In 1998, legacy Wachovia acquired two Virginia-based banks, Jefferson National Bank and Central Fidelity Bank. This purchase made legacy Wachovia one of the few companies with dual headquarters: one in Winston-Salem and one in Atlanta. Founded as Atlanta National Bank on September 14, 1865, and later renamed to First National Bank of Atlanta, this institution was the oldest national bank in Atlanta.

On December 12, 1986 Wachovia took over First Atlanta. Wachovia Bank and Trust was formed in 1911 by the merger of Wachovia National Bank (founded 1879) and Wachovia Loan and Trust (founded 1893), and was located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. First Union had to restructure and lay off thousands of employees in 1999, partly as a result of the purchase of CoreStates. Partly due to the CoreStates purchase and partially due to 80 other bank purchases over the last few years, First Union experienced several years of lower earnings and no dividend growth.

Furthermore, First Union substanially overpaid for CoreStates at over 4 times book value. As a result, customers left the bank in droves - First Union experienced a 19 percent attrition rate - because of poor customer service and the account issues. This attempt led to multiple problems: poorly trained employees (as CoreStates tellers were not familiar with the new systems) and First Union and CoreStates' systems unable to communicate with each other, which led to such problems as account access issues and payments not being correctly applied to loans. To start with, First Union attempted to rapidly integrate CoreStates' systems into First Union.

The purchase proved to be a fiasco for a number of reasons. CoreStates Financial Corporation, headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was acquired by First Union in April 1998. Over the decades, First Union purchased over 80 other banks before purchasing Wachovia, the majority of them in the 1990s. First Union National Bank of North Carolina was originally formed in 1958 with the merger of Union National Bank and First National Bank and Trust Company of Asheville.

It merged with Wachovia Corporation in 2001, and the combined company kept Wachovia's name. First Union Corporation was a large banking chain based in Charlotte, North Carolina. First Union then took the Wachovia name. While the transaction was billed as a merger of equals, the transaction was actually a purchase of the legacy Wachovia by Charlotte-based First Union Corporation.

Today's Wachovia Corporation was created by the merger of the legacy Wachovia Corporation and First Union Corporation. (See Old Salem.). The area formerly known as Bethabara is now inside the city limits of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When Moravian settlers arrived in Bethabara, North Carolina in 1753, they gave this name to the land they acquired, because it resembled a valley along the Danube River called Die Wachau.

The origin of the name is the Latin form of the German name Wachau. Wachovia, pronounced wah-KO-vee-yah, has one of the most unusual corporate names in the United States. . Wachovia Corporation NYSE: WB, based in Charlotte, North Carolina is one of the largest banking chains in the United States.

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Wachovia named fourth WORST bank in the world. 700,000 Bank Customers' Account Information Allegedly Stolen. Scope of bank data theft grows to 676,000 customers. The theft affected nearly 50,000 Wachovia customers, and the bank knew it ...

More than 100,000 customers of Wachovia and Bank of America have been notified that their financial records may have been stolen. Wachovia knew or should have known that customers' private information was being stolen or misappropriated. Wachovia lets hackers get access to bank accounts. Bank security breach may be biggest yet.