Northern Trust Corp. opened its first location in Ohio this month, a full-service trust office in Cleveland.
It will be staffed by three former executives from KeyCorp, the country’s 10th-largest bank, which said last week it will cut about 3,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, to improve its disappointing financial performance.
Northern’s Cleveland office will be located in KeyCorp’s headquarters. Chicago-based Northern has one of the nation’s largest trust operations, with $1.38 trillion in trust assets under management.
KeyCorp pulled off one of the banking industry’s first so-called merger-of-equals five years ago with the combination of Albany, N.Y.-based KeyBank and Cleveland’s Society Corp.
Although KeyCorp’s performance has not lived up to investors’ expectations, the merger-of-equals concept has become fashionable among banks.
Last year, First Chicago NBD Corp. merged with Banc One Corp. of Columbus, Ohio, to form Bank One Corp., and BankAmerica Corp. in San Francisco merged with NationsBank Corp. in Charlotte to form Bank of America Corp. The country’s largest financial-services deal ever was the merger-of-equals between banking giant Citicorp and insurance behemoth Travelers Group to form what is now Citigroup Inc.
Attention numismatists: If you liked collecting the U.S. Mint’s new commemorative state quarters, you’re going to love the latest development. Beginning this month, the Australian Perth Mint is issuing coins commemorating the U.S. state quarters.
The Australians are trying to cash in on the lucrative U.S. program spearheaded by Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.). That program, which will produce quarters honoring five states each year until 2008, is expected to be so popular with collectors that it could generate up to $5 billion for the federal government over 10 years.
The Australian coins will follow the same sequence as those in the U.S., with each state coin appearing in the order in which the state joined the union. In Australia, the Perth Mint will produce a limited number of Australian Kookaburras bearing a small version of each U.S. state’s quarter, sitting behind two kookaburras.
The U.S. has issued coins this year for Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut. The Illinois quarter will be minted in 2003.
Bank notes: Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Banking Committee, recently said in a statement on the House floor that one reason First National Bank of Keystone in West Virginia failed was a lack of proper regulatory oversight. “It appears that the FDIC was stymied at key points in its desire to conduct reviews of the bank’s activities,” Leach said, indicating the problem stemmed from disagreements between the agency and another top federal banking regulator about how the state-chartered bank should be examined. Leach has introduced legislation to strengthen the FDIC’s examination powers.
– ABN AMRO plans to file an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington in its case against the federal government for its LaSalle Talman Bank subsidiary, which in October was awarded only $5 million of the $1.2 billion it had sought from the federal government for reneging on a deal it made with Talman to help clean up the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early ’90s.
