CHICAGO (AP) -- Bank One Corp. has quietly been cutting as much as 5 percent of its work force as a result of the merger last year between First Chicago NBD and Banc One.
The nation's fourth-largest bank revealed Monday in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it will by year's end have eliminated as many as 4,700 of 94,000 jobs the two banks had last September.Bank One spokesman Stan Lata this morning said the company had eliminated 2,690 jobs by December and was working to reach its staffing goals through the sale of bank branches, attrition, outsourcing and consolidation.
"This is part of a merger integration plan that was announced last year to the analysts," Lata said. "We really haven't put together a list of specifics where the jobs have been either outsourced or eliminated, but where branches have been sold is pretty obvious."
Bank One took a pretax restructuring charge of $984 million in the fourth quarter of 1998 and expects to record another $526 million in merger-related charges this year, the company said in its filing. Of the $526 million this year, $54 million of that charge will be costs to integrate systems.
The company last year said it planned to eliminate jobs and outsource some operations to help achieve $930 million annually in savings. In the past few months, the bank has eliminated jobs in corporate lending and overseas trading.
It also had significant overlap in Indiana, the only state where the two former banks competed heavily against each other, and saw jobs reduced after selling branches there. Many of those jobs went to banks that bought the branches, Lata noted.
Meantime, the company has been expanding staff in Ohio for its retail banking, operations and investments business.
John Challenger, president of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said job cuts this year are likely to remain high as companies increasingly are merging to achieve savings and satisfy Wall Street's demands for increased profits. Last December was the worst layoff month in five years, largely as a result of merger activity, he said.
Bank One, like other banks that have recently merged, hopes to become a center for one-stop shopping for financial services such as loans, credit and mutual funds, but analysts have said that will take time as the companies merge their cultures and operations. The bank this year will advise customers about the switch in names, removing the First Chicago NBD name from the banking landscape.
Bank One has $260 billion in assets, more than 2,000 branches and 9,150 automated teller machines in the Midwest, South and Southwest. It is the nation's second-largest credit-card issuer, owning the First Chicago card and First USA credit operations.