CHARLOTTE — Wachovia Corp. aims to open as many as 130 branches over the next three years in key East Coast markets, including its first in New York City.
It plans to have a dozen branches in the city by yearend, most of them in a 100-block area of midtown Manhattan. It wants to win new customers as well as improve service to 100,000 current ones who commute into Manhattan daily, mostly from Westchester County, New York; northern New Jersey; and Connecticut.
“The idea of being in Manhattan is to be able to serve those customers not only where they live but where they work. And we also see a tremendous new customer acquisition initiative,” Benjamin P. Jenkins 3d, the president of the Charlotte company’s consumer and commercial banking division, said in an interview Tuesday.
Wachovia said it will add 30 branches this year and 30 to 50 in 2004 and 2005. It will also add branches in fast-growing markets within its 11-state territory, Mr. Jenkins said, including Atlanta; Charlotte; Raleigh, N.C.; Washington; southern Florida; and northern Virginia.
The former First Union Corp. bought and took the name of the old Wachovia in September 2001. The $342 billion-asset company already has branches in Westchester County, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as retail brokerage offices, a trading floor, and other operations in New York.
The expansion plan comes amid the combining and rebranding of its eastern branch networks. That project, which began in Florida in November, continues in Georgia next month, the Carolinas in May, and in northern markets in July and August.
As it enters an important market, Wachovia says it is confident in what has been a somewhat drawn-out integration. The $14 billion acquisition had a premium of just 6%, so there was no need for immediate and drastic cost cuts.
“We’re very pleased with the way the merger integration is going, in the 21st month of a 30-month process,” Mr. Jenkins said.
The first Manhattan branches are to open this summer, at the same time Wachovia is slated to kick of an advertising blitz in the metropolitan area promoting the rebranded former First Union branches.
Wachovia is also closing at least 200 offices in the integration. That would leave it with 2,500 to 2,600 branches by the end of 2005, a spokeswoman said.
