You thought that there couldn't really be more Chase banks in the City, didn't you? You thought after that deal that put a Chase ATM in every single Duane Reade in the entire city somebody would've said "Well, that seems like enough for us. Let's work a bit with what we got." Right? Cause we kind of hoped so. But, oh no! It wasn't to be.
Yesterday J.P. Morgan Chase announced that it was going to swap its corporate trust business for "virtually all of the Bank of New York's branches in the metropolitan area." In other words, there will now be 338 additional branches for Chase in the city.
The BoNY branches will be turned into Chases starting next spring. Meanwhile, Bank of New York will nearly double the size of its corporate trust business, "which handles record-keeping for corporate debt issues. The unit has become a major part of the bank's strategy as its retail operations have struggled."
We'd love to go on about Chase, talk about its recent big deals (they really do have so many ATMs now) and maybe even link to a few previous Gothamist posts about the bank. But we're not going to. Why? Because every time we try to search our own archives for posts about Chase we are overwhelmed by the remnants of a huge amount of comment spam from somebody calling themselves "chase home finance" and telling us that we really should read something or other about the bank (nope, not going to happen...). So instead of saying how much we actually like the idea of the New York bank market consolidating a bit, we're just going to stop this post right here.
"Isn't this an advertisement or something?" from Mary Hodder's flickr stream.
