Bank One becomes JPMorgan Chase

Bank One will be officially known as JPMorgan Chase when business opens Monday.

Bank One, as it's known today, can trace its roots in Grayson County back 173 years, Sherman Bank President Sam Henry said Friday.

Banks changing names is nothing new to Texas customers, but Henry said he expects this to be the last change for the Bank One customers. He said the merger made good business sense.

Chase only had banking in four states, but Bank One was more retail oriented and spreading across many more states. The marriage of the two is good from that standpoint, he said, because there will be a wider range of products available to customers.

Henry said Bank One customers will not notice much of a difference. The ATM base is expanded to 850 across Texas alone.

”Chase has been well recognized in the money market and we will pick up a lot of people who have been chase customers,“ Henry said. ”As customer checks and other materials run out, they will be replaced with Chase materials but bank account numbers will remain the same. You may not need or want all of the services we can provide, but they'll still be there.“

The actual merger took place a year ago, Henry said. The two banks have worked together since then to make all the buildings look the same and merge systems. It's been an expensive process, but the end result is locations across the country that will make a customer feel he's in familiar surroundings even if he's in a Chase Bank across the country from the one in Sherman or Denison.

A Chase Web site states in the last nine months, JPMorgan Chase has:

Converted 31 million heritage Chase credit card accounts with $69 billion in balances to a common platform, after more than 900,000 hours of programming and testing. Today, all 95 million credit cards are served through a state-of-the-art TSYS platform.

Migrated core customer, deposits, lending and treasury management systems - the heart of a bank customer account systems - to new mainframes, significantly improving the reliability and resiliency of the Chase technology environment

Converted the network infrastructure for all consumer businesses to $500 million state-of-the-art data centers.

Migrated images of more than 400 million heritage Bank One documents, ranging from home finance to credit asset management, to a centralized image archive system.

Consolidated 1.8 million customers of the two heritage mutual fund families onto one platform, under the JPMorgan Funds brand.

Insourced more than 4,500 technology professionals in order to generate competitive advantages, accelerate innovation, and become more streamlined and efficient.

Converted all U.S. dollar clearing systems onto global clearing platform, providing wire and ACH services to nearly 50,000 clients. The firm handled an industry-record level 529,000 transactions for $3 trillion on a single day.

Bank One's philosophy on community involvement will not change, Henry assures. Chase sees its role in the community as being a partner the same way Bank one did. In fact, the company spent $6.7 million in 94 Texas communities last year.

”The concept is the same and the people providing the service are the same,“ Henry said. ”Just a better selection.“

What are people saying about mortgages today:

Rates on 30-year mortgages edged down last week to a seven-month low. Mortgage-giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday that 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages fell to 6.3 percent, down slightly from 6.31 percent two weeks ago. It put rates at the lowest level since they were at 6.24 percent the first week of March.

Bank of Hawaii, Central Pacific Bank, Territorial Savings Bank and Wells Fargo Home Mortgages all cut their 30-year mortgage rates to 5.75 percent this week.

Most people think of a mortgage as a means to an end. After all, you buy a house, not a home loan. But a mortgage is much more than the path to homeownership. It is a financial instrument that must be managed, just like any other financial investment.