39 Facts About Wachovia

Wachovia was a diversified financial services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Wachovia provided a broad range of banking, asset management, wealth management, and corporate and investment banking products and services.

Wachovia provided global services through more than 40 offices around the world.

The Wachovia brand was absorbed into the Wells Fargo brand in a process that lasted three years.

Wachovia was the product of a 2001 merger between the original Wachovia Corporation, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Charlotte-based First Union Corporation.

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In 2009, Wachovia Securities was the first Wachovia business to be converted to the Wells Fargo brand, when the business became Wells Fargo Advisors.

Wachovia has its origins in the Latin form of the Austrian name Wachau.

The area formerly known as Wachovia now makes up most of Forsyth County, and the largest city is Winston-Salem.

Wachovia grew to become one of the largest banks in the Southeast partly on the strength of its accounts from the R J Reynolds Tobacco Company, which was headquartered in Winston-Salem.

In 1991, Wachovia entered the South Carolina market by acquiring South Carolina National Corporation, founded as the Bank of Charleston in 1834.

In 1998, Wachovia acquired two Virginia-based banks, Jefferson National Bank and Central Fidelity Bank.

In 1997, Wachovia acquired both 1st United Bancorp and American Bankshares Inc, giving its first entry into Florida.

In 2000, Wachovia made its final purchase, which was Republic Security Bank.

The cards, which would have still been branded as Wachovia, would have been issued through Bank One's First USA division.

Wachovia first began converting systems in the southeast United States where both banks had branches, before moving to First Union's branches in the Northeast, which only had to change their signs to reflect the new company name and logo.

Wachovia was ranked number one in customer satisfaction among major banks by the University of Michigan's annual American Customer Satisfaction Index for every year after the merger.

Between 2001 and 2006, Wachovia bought several other financial services companies in an attempt to become a national bank and comprehensive financial services company.

In June 2005, Wachovia negotiated to purchase monoline credit card company MBNA.

Wachovia received $100 million as the result of an agreement Wachovia predecessor First Union made in 2000 when it sold its credit card portfolio to MBNA.

In late 2005 Wachovia announced that it would end its relationship with MBNA and create its own credit card division so that the bank could issue its own Visa cards.

Westcorp, Western Financial Bank's parent company, WFS Financial Inc and Wachovia announced a proposed acquisition by Wachovia in September 2005.

Wachovia agreed to purchase Golden West Financial for a little under $25.

Wachovia greatly raised its profile in California, where Golden West held $32 billion in deposits and operated 123 branches.

Some current and former Wachovia officials said that the merger was agreed to within days, making it impossible to thoroughly vet the World Savings loan portfolio.

In 2007, after the merger, World Savings, then known as Wachovia Mortgage began to attract more borrowers by taking a step that some regulators frowned upon, and which the former World Savings management had resisted for years: it allowed borrowers to make monthly payments with an annual interest rate of just 1 percent.

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Analysts said that Wachovia purchased Golden West at the peak of the US housing boom.

In early March 2008 Wachovia began to phase out the AG Edwards brand in favor of a unified Wachovia Securities.

Wachovia, excluding subsidiaries, was the fourth largest bank at the end of 2008.

Wachovia had been head of the company since 2000, while it was still known as First Union.

Under the circumstances, regulators feared that if customers pulled out more money, Wachovia wouldn't have enough liquidity to meet its obligations.

From this point on, Citigroup became the source of liquidity allowing Wachovia to continue to operate until the acquisition was complete.

Wachovia expected to continue as a publicly traded company, retaining its retail brokerage arm, Wachovia Securities and Evergreen mutual funds.

One financial expert told the Observer that if Wachovia's shareholders voted the deal down, the OCC could have simply seized Wachovia and placed it into the receivership of the FDIC, which would then sell it to Citigroup.

Wachovia preferred the Wells Fargo deal because it would be worth more than the Citigroup deal and keep all of its businesses intact.

In total, Wachovia accepted $142 million in unsigned checks from "companies that made unauthorized withdrawals from thousands of accounts", collecting millions of dollars in fees from them.

The investigation found that Wachovia had failed to conduct suitable due diligence, and that it would have discovered the thefts if it had followed normal procedures.

However, not only is it a "lucrative industry" that is able to charge high fees, but Wachovia viewed it as a way to gain a foothold in the Hispanic banking market.

In March 2010, Wachovia admitted "serious and systemic" violations of the Bank Secrecy Act that allowed Mexican and Colombian drug cartels to launder $378.

Reports in Bloomberg Businessweek in June 2010 and The Observer in April 2011 shed light on the extent to which Wachovia went to turn a blind eye, including by ignoring the warnings and suspicious activity reports of its London-based director of anti-money-laundering.