Everything about Fleetboston Financial totally explained
FleetBoston Financial was a
Boston,
Massachusetts–based
bank created in
1999 by the merger of Fleet Financial Group and
BankBoston. In
2004 it merged with
Bank of America; all of its banks and branches were given the Bank of America logo.
History
Providence-based Fleet Bank began to acquire banks outside of
Rhode Island in the 1980s and early nineties, most notably Norstar Bank of upstate New York in 1988 and Bank of New England in 1991. In 1992, the merged Fleet/Norstar was renamed Fleet Financial Group.
Fleet was already one of the three largest banks in New England, together with Shawmut Bank and Bank of Boston, yet state and federal regulators allowed Fleet to merge with Shawmut in 1995, creating a major regional bank that held 30% of all deposits in New England. Fleet was now the largest bank in New England and the ninth largest in the United States.
As a result of the merger with Shawmut, Fleet acquired the
naming rights to the newly built Shawmut Center, a sports arena that was to replace the old Boston Garden. The arena therefore opened as the FleetCenter in
1995. After FleetBoston's sale to Bank of America in 2004, the bank chose to give up its naming rights and an announcement was made on
March 3,
2005 that the arena would be renamed
TD Banknorth Garden. It is home to the
Boston Celtics of the
National Basketball Association and the
Boston Bruins of the
National Hockey League.
In 1996 Fleet acquired the US branch network (in New York and New Jersey) of the UK bank
National Westminster.
Fleet's biggest merger came in 1999, when it acquired
BankBoston, which was itself the fruit of a 1996 merger between Bank of Boston and BayBank. The new FleetBoston was the culmination of a series of Boston-area bank mergers that swallowed all middle-tier banks into a single behemoth. FleetBoston was the seventh-largest bank in the
United States, as measured by assets (
US$197 billion in
2003). It had almost 50,000 employees, over 20 million customers worldwide and revenues of $12 billion per year.
FleetBoston faced a class-action suit over a "
bait and switch" scam where it promised a no-annual fee credit card, only to impose a fee months later. When
Bank of America acquired Fleet in 2004, its overall Customer Satisfaction Index (as measured by the University of Michigan), was dragged down from 74 to 72. Bank of America devoted considerable resources to improving its New England branches' reputation for customer service, establishing customer call centers and hiring more tellers per branch.
Further Information
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