U.S. Bank of Johnstown, Pa., has sold its name and trademark rights to the much larger and better known U.S. Bank in Minneapolis.
The Pennsylvania bank will become Ameriserv Financial on May 7; its parent companys name will also change, from USbancorp to Ameriserv Financial Inc.
The $1.2 billion-asset company said it will receive $300,000 from $160 billion-asset U.S. Bancorp, the parent of numerous U.S. Banks. Western Pennsylvania is the only part of the country where the Minneapolis company does not own the name and trademark.
Orlando B. Hanselman, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of USbancorp, said that it had decided on the name change in the fall of 1999.
As U.S. Bancorp in Minnesota continued to grow and merge and move eastward, and as we have moved into many different states with our trust and financial services, overlap became much more difficult to avoid, Mr. Hanselman said.
We were also preparing to launch our Web site and realized that would magnify confusions exponentially.
When his company chose the Ameriserv name, he said, he approached the other U.S. Bancorp.
The negotiated price will cover only part of the roughly $650,000 that the name change will cost, Mr. Hanselman said. Three of his companys four other subsidiaries will also take the Ameriserv name; Standard Mortgage Corp. in Atlanta will not.
A U.S. Bancorp spokeswoman said it would not discuss the deal or say whether it plans to move into western Pennsylvania.
The spokeswoman noted however that the company acquired Mellon Network Services electronic funds transfer processing unit in May 1999; the unit is based in Pittsburgh, about 70 miles from Johnstown.
The big Minneapolis company clashed earlier with another small Pennsylvania banking company with a similar name.
In September 1999 it sued what had been USABancshares after the Philadelphia company renamed itself USABanc.com. The suit was successful; USABanc.com renamed itself USABancshares.com.
Mr. Hanselman insisted that U.S. Bancorp had not prompted him to abandon the U.S. Bank name but he said he realized he could not go online with it.
U.S. Bancorp executives have aggressively defended their name usage, he said, and we knew we were getting close to violating their rights.
