Although most opponents of bank mergers are community activists, even the wealthy have gripes when their banks get bigger.
Just ask Fleet Financial Group Inc. The newly enlarged banking behemoth is fighting a lawsuit filed by a trust beneficiary who wants out.
In a case now winding its way through a Massachusetts court, Martha P. Greene, 63, is asserting that her late father, Judd Payne, never intended for her investments to be taken care of by a bank as large as Fleet. He set up her trust account more than 30 years ago at a small local bank, Franklin County Trust Co., which was absorbed successively by Worcester Bank Corp., Shawmut National Corp., and, last year, by Fleet.
"I've lost all personal touch with anybody involved with the trust," Ms. Greene said. "You dial 1-800 and get Fleet-central."
The amount of assets caught up in such legal imbroglios is little when compared to the roughly $2 trillion in discretionary trusts. But consultants and other observers warned that suits like the one facing Fleet would become more common as the banking industry consolidates.
What's a newly merged bank to do? Hold on to staff members that beneficiaries know.
"If the administrator can say, 'We're the same people at the same location delivering the same service,' that often wins the day," said James D. Kemp, a private banking consultant in Dallas.
Yet merged banks often centralize trust departments in pursuit of cost efficiency. In those cases, Mr. Kemp said, banks may have to forfeit some accounts to avoid controversy.
"The bank can resign anytime" as trustee, Mr. Kemp said. "That's my advice to clients who have unhappy, vocal accounts."
In Fleet's case, Ms. Greene said, she got fed up when the bank shifted her investments out of blue-chip stocks and into its own mutual funds - a move that she said had bad tax implications. Late last year, she asked Franklin County Probate Court to remove Fleet as her trustee and replace it with a local institution, Greenfield Savings Bank.
This month, Ms. Greene learned that Fleet had charged her account $2,800 to cover its legal fees in fighting her suit.
Ms. Greene has already removed from Fleet a trust established for her by her mother. While that trust, which is now at Greenfield, had a provision allowing for a change of trustee, the one set up by her father years earlier does not.
An attorney involved in the pending case finds it ironic that a beneficiary would argue for the right to remove a trustee.
"It's interesting that now beneficiaries conceive an ownership when the whole point of a trust is to give the bank power," the attorney said.
