Easy Banking Through Wells Fargo

A bank is well known by the relationship it has with the public. Now in this twenty-first century there are thousands of bank present in the world which are very popular in the market. As all the banks are good advertiser of themselves so it will be very difficult for you to judge which banks are the best to deal with. As an interested person about banking sector you have heard of Wells Fargo. Here through this Wells Fargo I will make you aware about Wells Fargo.

What is Wells Fargo? Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial company with worldwide operation with their Headquarter situated at San Francisco, California. It is merger between California based Wells Fargo & Company and Minneapolis based Norwest Corporation in 1998. They chose to keep the name Wells Fargo just to capitalize on the 150-years history of the nationally recognized Wells Fargo brand name.

It is the fourth largest bank in US by assets and second largest bank by market capitalization. It is also the second largest bank in deposit; home mortgage services and debit cards. They were the only bank in United States which got AAA rating by S&P although their rating came down to AA- in 2008 due to the financial crisis. It has 6650 retail branches, 12,260 ATM's, 276,000 employees and over 48 million customers and was recently termed "The Worlds Safest Bank In US" in 2007/08.

Wells Fargo provides financial services in over 80 different lines and delineates 3 business segments: Retail Banking, Wholesale Banking, and Consumer Banking.

Now, what are its Lines of Business? These include:

a) Community banking that includes Wealth Management Group, Diversified Product and Consumer Deposits Group. The Company has 9400 mortgage branches throughout the country.

b)Brokerage that includes the company offering investment products through Wells Fargo investments, LLC , Wells Fargo Advisors and offering mutual funds through Wells Fargo Advantage & Evergreen Funds.

c) Calibre, which it had used as part of purchasing of Wachovia.

d) The company launched its first personal computer banking in 1989 and was the first to introduce banking accounts on the web in May 1995.Currently it offers online storage of documents.

e) Wholesale segment includes lending, treasury management, mutual funds, asset-based lending, commercial real-estate, corporate and institutional trust services, and investment banking trough Wells Fargo Securities .The Company also owns Barington Associates, a middle market investment bank.

f) Consumer Finance which engages in lending through over 1000 branches worldwide. The home mortgage group is based out of West Des Moines, lowa.

g) Business Model of Wells Fargo aims at encouraging customers to buy their financial products so that they get a better deal,be loyal , stay with the company longer thus improving retention. This concept is known as "cross-sell ratio", which is popular in the financial service industry. The average Cross-sell ratio is 2 but the company gives 5.5 products per Community Banking Household and 6.1 for Wholesale banking customer.

Most Recently Wachovia had agreed to be bought by Wells Fargo for about $14.8B in an all stock transaction on Oct 3, 2008. But previously Citygroup had agreed on buying Wachovia for $2.1B through the FDIC. So they threatened legal action .On Oct 4, 2008 the state judge issued a temporary injection blocking the transaction was overturned the next evening. So Citygroup and Wells finally entered into a negotiation.

Thus Wells Fargo provides you with a detailed structure of how and why we should consider Wells Fargo & Company.