US Banker articles from June 2004

US Banker archives from June 2004

Editor's Note.
June 1, 2004... Nomination forms for USB's annual ranking of "The 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking" can be downloaded from the magazine's Web site (www.us-banker.com). The ranking will appear in the October 2004 issue. Copyright 2004 Thomson Media Inc....

Nuts in New Haven? Well, Fiery to Say the Least.: The influence and respect she commanded at her previous post with Dime Savings Bank would be put to the test by the people of New Haven, including its mayor.
June 1, 2004... When NewAlliance CEO Peyton Patterson walked into the studio for a photo shoot on September 5, 2003, you would have never known the fight she was waging back in New Haven, CT. Of course, that was before NewAlliance ever existed. Patterson...

Consumer Banking: Drive Away with a Loan!: Auto shops (quietly) expand their businesses.
June 1, 2004... Toyota and General Motors are among a growing number of auto manufacturers setting up banks in the U.S. to expand their finance arms. Both have filed industrial bank charters. Pending the outcome, that would allow them almost everything a...

Scene and Heard.
June 1, 2004... "Smith Barney was doing backflips trying to figure it out." Chuck Ogilvie, founder of StillPoint Advisors, on luring away a team of Boca Raton money managers from the venerable Street firm. "The consumer has an increasingly astute and...

Technology: One Man's Trash Is...: Dumpster-diving for disk drives raises eyebrows.
June 1, 2004... Between Washington Mutual getting blackmailed after selling computers with sensitive information and now another firm's ATM disk drives showing up on eBay, banks might need to think harder about how they trash their computers. Properly...

Hits and Has-Beens.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Sandra E. Bell has been named evp and CFO of $73 billion Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati. She was previously managing director of Deutsche Bank Securities in New York for over 12 years. Roger Plemens has been promoted to president and...

Fresh Ink.(Mergers, acquisitions and divestments)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... 1. Citizens Financial Group, a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland, plans to buy Charter One Financial for $10.5 billion in cash. The move, which puts Citizens in the top 10 domestic banks, makes US operations responsible for 25 percent of the...

Shareholder Activism: Fifth Third Bank Makes It Tough for Social Advocates: Discrimination based on sexual orientation at issue.
June 1, 2004... Fifth Third Bancorp faced a proxy vote in its annual meeting this year that small and mid-tier banks would be wise to heed. A proposal from Boston's NorthStar Asset Management called for a bank policy that prohibits discrimination based on...

Pipeline.
June 1, 2004... Fewer Paper Cuts A number of banks, including Bank of America, Bank One, PNC Bank, JPMorgan Chase and National City Bank, have been using virtual data rooms to facilitate mergers and acquisitions of investment banking clients. The company...

Mergers: BNP Paribas' Global Soiree has a Local Feel: A French banking giant comes calling stateside.
June 1, 2004... If the new F-word is 'French,' then the U.S. retail banking industry has grown noticeably potty-mouthed these past few months. In March, BNP Paribas, the largest bank in France and the ninth largest in the world, announced that it would...

...Next We'll Be Talking About Pyongyang's Great Golfing.(North Korea's economic reforms and proxy rebellion in Heritage Commerce Corp)
June 1, 2004... To the uninitiated, which is much of the outside world, North Korea is an alien place-scary with the bomb, or a crazy house where the Dear Leader takes cues for his hairstyle from The King, or some fevered, hardly imaginable combination. ...

Noted and Noteworthy.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... with suntrust's purchase of supermarket bank National Commerce Financial, the good old Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, the Atlanta firm is well-positioned to go after First Market Bank, a 30-branch, $1 billion firm in the Monument City. It's...

More or Less Alphabet Soup?: It takes FDIC vice chairman John Reich only slightly longer to lay out his rule-cutting priorities as it does to describe the tool he aims to use. He's got time, though.(United States. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.)
June 1, 2004... Here's relief spelled out the way only a Beltway clerk could love: EGRPRA. Time-quite likely, a lot of it-will tell if it eases the heartburn some feel on the Hill about regulations. The Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction...

Security: Goin' Phishing: These growing e-mail attacks have defrauded clients and banks of $1.2 billion. But what's the reputational cost?
June 1, 2004... Banks have battled worms, viruses, trojan horses and spyware with ample equanimity for years. But the most formidable combatant on the scam scene is proving to be purveyors of phishing, the distribution of spoofed e-mail messages with return...

Magic's a Downtown Hit. Now He's Got a Card.: The Laker legend is putting muscle into pressing prepaid cards into the palms of his peeps. His latest inner-city venture, the largest-scale offering to date, is backed by BofA and Visa.
June 1, 2004... Magic Johnson is bringing plastic to inner cities with a stored-value Visa from startup Celebrity Cards International. If successful, the card product will divert business from check cashers and bring electronic payment services to those with...

AD Beat: Capgemini Gains New Look and Loses Monkey: It wasn't prescience or prudence. Capgemini's obligatory name change jettisons the scandal-touched E&Y brand and ushers in a new era for its business.
June 1, 2004... Capgemini is ridding itself of the monkey on its back with a name change that leaves the past behind. It's starting a global campaign to reflect new objectives. The consultant and outsourcer to financial services firms has changed its name...

Diversity is About Equality, and That's Good for Bank Business: Rose Patten, the first woman appointed to Bank of Montreal's executive committee, says gender issues are a matter of environment, not numbers.(Interview)
June 1, 2004... A recent Catalyst study commissioned by Bank of Montreal shows companies with the highest representation of women in senior management have 35 percent greater returns on equity and 34 percent greater total shareholder returns than firms with...

The Heart of the Matter: Elder services may be for a life gone gray, but it's about living. "We're both big fans of our Minnesota Orchestra." Harriet Thompson, 88.(banking services for elders)
June 1, 2004... Bill Horning knew when Wrinkles went that it would get bad. It did. Wrinkles was his Aunt Jane's dog. Aunt Jane was 82. It's a common thing, the start of a spiral; it can come from anything at that age. She loved that dog. Not one to...

A Town Divided.
June 1, 2004... When CEO Peyton Patterson moved to convert then-mutual thrift New Haven Savings Bank and buy two other banks in one shot, she underestimated the pride and pull of the town's liberal residents. The political firestorm created by the...

The Early Bank Gets the Worm: No Bank Was More Prepared For The 10-State Expansion Of The EU Than Vienna-Based Bank Austria Creditanstalt Group, whose 13-year push into central and eastern Europe is finally paying off.
June 1, 2004... A collective yawn was stifled across most of Western Europe last month when the 15-member European Union added 10 states and 75 million consumers, mostly from the former Eastern Bloc. But not the banking sector, which has been salivating after...

Small Bank CFO's Dream: New-Age Data Mining: Bank of Idaho CFO Peter W. Minford was tired of slogging through reports, culling info manually. So he concocted a database-aggregation platform and is now selling it.
June 1, 2004... As a long-time bank CFO Peter W. Minford understands the never-ending migraine of trying to coax information from multiple databases into the multitude of regulatory and management reports required daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly....

Pricing, Profitability Stand Out In Sea of Loan Similarities: Accredited Home Lenders notched $8 billion in mortgage origination volume last year, while total revenues increased 117 percent. Its secret: profitable non-prime customers.
June 1, 2004... The salubrious effects of rising home values and low interest rates are unmistakable at a place like Accredited Home Lenders, which focuses on originating, servicing and selling non-conforming or non-prime loans. For while it remains incredibly...

Popular, Yes. Star Power? Nah. Interest? For Sure.: After losing business to the bond markets and a comatose economy during the past few years, bank loans are being used now for everything, even paying shareholder dividends.
June 1, 2004... With all due respect to The Bard, it's not so bad these days for companies to either lenders or borrowers be. Corporate boardrooms are eager to borrow money and banks are even more eager to loan it. In fact, the latest development of...

Wealth Schmelth. Anybody Can Buy Private Equity.: Private equity for the Everyman is making a comeback, but experts warn that most people don't have the patience for it. They also suggest avoiding the stupid ideas.
June 1, 2004... A new type of investment is bringing the formerly high-flying private equity arena to the little people. Anybody who can afford to buy a $15 stock can act like a big shot. These investment vehicles, with the somewhat bland moniker of...

Signs are Good. So Let's Get On with Business.: All indicators are in place to see pent-up demand for business investment. The financial sector should be the first to see a boost. And no one is debating the role that finance will play in growth.
June 1, 2004... One day in the first week of May most of the papers ran several headlines touting the good news for economic recovery in the U.S.: productivity is rising, jobless claims are the lowest in four years, and Greenspan repeated for the Nth time that...

U.S. Banker Advertising Contacts.(Brief Article)(Directory)
June 1, 2004... GROUP PUBLISHER Jay Berfas Thomson Media One State Street Plaza New York, NY 10004 Tel: 212.803.8690 Fax: 646.264.6800 U.S. BANKER ACCOUNT REPRESENTATIVES Southeast/Mid-Atlantic Publisher David...

The Upside to Debt? Getting Customers to Buy Into Protection.
June 1, 2004... It's not likely we will look back at the past few years as the exciting good old days when debt protection products came into their own. But the industry is watching something dramatically change the business of selling insurance and borrower...