July 2009 Archives

Jason Menke

We've been getting a lot of questions from customers about how our home mortgage team is approaching the Wachovia integration, and I'm pleased to report it's well underway. As Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and Wachovia Mortgage combine, we're bringing together all parts of the organization from sales to our servicing teams.

For the past several months, we've been integrating our mortgage sales teams so they now offer Wells Fargo mortgage loans. This includes the local people who sit in Wachovia bank stores and mortgage offices and the underwriters and loan processors they all work with.

So now when you walk into your local Wachovia bank to apply for a mortgage, the home mortgage consultant will give you his or her Wells Fargo Home Mortgage business card, along with Wells Fargo materials. It will also mean that after you close your new loan, you'll get monthly statements from Wells Fargo, not Wachovia.

This month, we expect to wrap up the transition of the loan application and approval teams who work with customers who call one of our toll-free numbers or apply for a mortgage on the Internet. Later this year, we expect to start integrating our mortgage servicing teams — the people you talk to when you've got a question or concern about your loan payment.

Also, Wells Fargo customers have an additional way to make their Wells Fargo mortgage, and Home Equity loan or line of credit payment. Wachovia Financial Centers can now accept payments for these products, meaning our customers have another payment option available to them.

As information about how we're integrating our mortgage servicing operations comes available, we'll let you know what those changes are and how they'll affect you. In the meantime, for questions or issues with your existing mortgage, the best thing to do is continue to call the numbers on your monthly statements. If you find yourself in a situation where you can't make your mortgage payments, the sooner you contact us, the more options we may be able to provide.

Of course, we know so many of you have been calling. And you've told us in person and in comments here on the blog that you want the transition to be seamless. We really want to thank you so much for your patience, and to let you know we're working as hard and as quickly as we can to help you in these difficult times.

As always, we welcome your input, so please continue to let us know how we're doing with the integration.

Matt Wadley

Last year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia team members combined to volunteer over 1.4 million hours of their time to help local organizations and communities! They also served on 16,000 nonprofit boards and raised a record $39.3 million during the Community Support/United Way campaign.

As separate companies, Wells Fargo and Wachovia were equally dedicated to giving back to the community — combined, we have become twice as strong.

Whether we're helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity, providing funding for a program that supplies professional clothing for folks going out on job interviews, or supporting non-profits that depend on automobiles for food delivery programs during the gas crisis last year, my colleagues continue to make a difference every day in local communities across America.

And as we integrate our two companies, we've learned that Wells Fargo and Wachovia have operated their community support programs in very similar ways: By putting the decision making at the local level, both companies have allowed the needs of the local community to dictate how funds and volunteer hours are best used.

These local commitments are a key part of each company's culture, and we plan to honor and stay involved in Wells Fargo and Wachovia communities across the country.

So what's next? Well, the Wachovia Foundation will stay active into 2010, but will eventually merge and become part of the Wells Fargo Foundation. And, of course, we are always looking at ways to increase our focus on volunteerism.

But probably the most important thing is continuing to listen to the needs of our neighbors.  So when challenges arise, our team members have the flexibility to respond to the immediate, and often unexpected, needs of our local communities.

We're here to help.

Marianne Babal

By now you know that Wachovia Securities has changed its name to Wells Fargo Advisors — we've written about it here previously. What you may not know is that the headquarters for Wells Fargo Advisors is St. Louis, Missouri , a city with a long tradition of new beginnings.

St. Louis has always been an important gateway to the frontier  and a jumping off place for western exploration and travel. In 1858 the first regularly scheduled cross-country stagecoach trip began in St. Louis, bound for San Francisco, 25 days and 2,800 miles away.

Wells Fargo helped organize and finance the Overland Mail Company , whose stagecoaches carried mail and passengers between St. Louis and San Francisco. The stage line became known as the "Butterfield Line"  after Overland Mail president John Butterfield.  Mail sent twice weekly by stage greatly improved mail service between eastern and western states.

On September 16, 1858, the first westbound mail left St. Louis by train to Tipton, where the mailbags were loaded aboard a stagecoach for the first leg of the stage journey west. The St. Louis mail arrived in San Francisco just after midnight on October 10. The first mail from California arrived in St. Louis on October 9, 1858, 24 days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes from San Francisco.

"A great fact is accomplished," proclaimed the Missouri Republican that day. "What hitherto has been regarded as a visionary and speculative enterprise has been established beyond all doubt, and St. Louis and San Francisco have been brought within 24 days' travel of each other."

The headquarters for the Overland Mail Company in St. Louis was located at 207 North Third Street. The three-story red brick building was less than a decade old when the stage company set up shop in 1858 in St. Louis' bustling riverfront commercial district. 

Eighty years later the building and its neighbors — over 37 city blocks in all — were torn down to clear land for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial  and its famous Arch.

I recently took another look at a photo of the old Overland Mail building in St. Louis, taken in 1936, shortly before its demolition. This time, something new caught my eye: a sign on the front of the forlorn building read "Hellman Bros."

The Hellman name is very familiar at Wells Fargo, where several generations of Hellmans served as bank presidents back to Isaias W. Hellman in 1905. And indeed, the Hellman Bros. of St. Louis were relatives of our banker I.W. His cousins Louis and Abraham Hellman engaged in the liquor business in St. Louis, while Isadore and Milton Hellman's fur warehouse occupied the historic building where so many stagecoach passengers had bought their tickets years before.

I'm constantly amazed at the intersections and intertwinings of history I uncover in our company's past. And I’m looking forward to learning even more as the integration of Wachovia and Wells Fargo continues.

Matt Wadley

When the calendar turned to July last week, it marked the 6-month anniversary of Wells Fargo and Wachovia joining forces to become One Team, Twice As Strong. It also represented the same milestone for our blog!

It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyways) that we hope you've found the information provided here over the first half of 2009 to be helpful, informative and maybe even a little entertaining.

But what you may not realize is how useful the last six months of hearing directly from all of you has been for us. Your questions and comments have provided us with a unique insight into how to better help all of our customers understand how the merger impacts them directly.

Today we've updated the Wells Fargo and Wachovia FAQs posted on the Wells Fargo-Wachovia Information Center to clarify and add details about the topics you've told us you want to know more about. In addition to an overall refresh of both the "Q's" and "A's," we've spelled out the FDIC's expanded account insurance coverage, added information to let you know if and what types of checks you may be able to cash at our bank stores, and even explained why Wells Fargo calls its banking locations "stores."

We thank you for your readership and look forward to another great 6 months of blogging with you. And, as always, keep the feedback coming.

Molly Murphy

You might have noticed, as we have, that the Wells Fargo monthly statement redesign has been a much-commented item here on the blog. One of our readers, Dorothy (05/12/09), recently provided her assessment:

Very dissapointed (sic) in the new on-line statements. Confusing and hard to read your current balance.

Dorothy, we hear you. So in the spirit of our blog, we want to give you (and everyone else who's commented on the new statements) some background information on the statement redesign, and let you know how we landed where we did. It's also important to do because Wachovia customers will be seeing this statement in the coming months as the first market begins to convert.

The first thing we should mention is that, in coming up with the new monthly statement redesign, we did as much research as possible. We talked to lots of people in order to understand how you, our customers, use your bank statements and what your preferences are.

Back to the design: The new statement has all the details of the old one, but now includes new sections — like an account checklist, streamlined summaries and one-stop transaction views — that we feel make it simpler to navigate. Our hope was that the enhancements would make it easier for you to manage your finances by providing clearer account summary sections. In addition, many of you are becoming more and more comfortable with our Online Banking statement, and its format is very similar to that of our new printed statements.

If how your checks are listed is important to you, maybe the "Summary of Checks" section, located after the "Transaction History" section, will help! It lists your checks in numerical order, as we've heard some of you say you prefer.

Also, many of you have said you find the font size of the new statements "too small" and "hard to read," and we apologize for that inconvenience. While we know it may not be an ideal solution, one thing you can do is sign up for Online Statements. Not only are you able to increase the font size through your internet browser, but you can also reduce the risk of mail fraud and help the environment by reducing paper!

Well, that's it for now. We hope we've been able to address some of your questions and concerns about the new monthly statement format. Thanks for all your comments, and please keep letting us know what you think!

Matt Wadley

Well, the merger news keeps coming, and we keep delivering. The most recent information we have for you is that Wells Fargo has announced that its investment banking and capital markets businesses — formerly operating under the Wachovia Securities and certain Wells Fargo brands — will now operate under the brand Wells Fargo Securities.

This won't be big news to the majority of you reading the blog, but it is a merger development, and we wanted to make you aware of it.

In case you're curious, the new Wells Fargo Securities will bring together the firm's businesses in debt and equity underwriting, mergers and acquisitions, loan syndications, debt and equity sales and trading, tax-exempt products, research and economics, and hedging products relating to equity, commodities and interest rate risks. If you need any of these services, give them a call.

And of course, as we told you earlier, retail brokerage products and services formerly marketed as Wachovia Securities are now offered through Wells Fargo Advisors.

That's it for now, but please stay tuned for more updates, and keep your comments coming!

Lovester Law

This Saturday, America's patriotism is on full display: Our red, white and blue show boldly throughout communities all over the U.S., in small towns and big cities alike. It's a day when we share a special connection with our country — our past and our future. We enjoy the food, the fireworks, our families and friends.

And we create memories that last a lifetime.

I will always remember the July 4th parade traveling down Main Street in my home town of Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania. Growing up, all of those special sights were dazzling to me. Toss in the sounds of gatherings and smells of incredible bar-b-que wafting from almost every backyard, and it became even more amazing — a holiday to be cherished and remembered.

Wells Fargo has a longstanding tradition of being involved in our communities, and this July 4th, we're proud to help create some new holiday memories: The Wells Fargo Stagecoach will appear at 25 events across the country, from New Hampshire to New Mexico. In doing so, the Stagecoach — an Independence Day reminder of our country's pioneering spirit — will be seen and celebrated by a million people.

Again, to see if the Wells Fargo Stagecoach is appearing near you this holiday weekend, take a look at that schedule. I hope you can join us. And please have a safe and wonderful 4th of July!

Matt Wadley

Since we launched the blog, we've been doing our best to keep you posted on any integration information and changes. Like back in March, when we told you that Wachovia Securities was going to change its name to Wells Fargo Advisors.

Today, we have another name change to tell you about: Wachovia Insurance Services, Inc. has officially changed its name to Wells Fargo Insurance Services USA, Inc.

If you're interested, here's the official press release.

So what does the name change mean for our current Wachovia Insurance Services customers? Well, you are going to start seeing the Wells Fargo Insurance Services name on websites and communications – otherwise, there aren't any expected changes to your accounts or services. The same folks you've been working with will continue to help you with all your insurance needs.

As usual, we will continue to update you on any additional integration news as soon as we can. In the meantime, thanks again for your business, your patience, and your feedback.