PNC Chairman Discusses Bank Branch Conversion

PNC Chairman and CEO Jim Rohr spoke to the Pittsburgh Business Times, a sister publication of the DBJ, about the completion of its conversion of National City branches.

PNC (NYSE: PNC) acquired National City Dec. 31, 2008, for $5.6 billion, essentially doubling PNC’s size and taking its footprint deeper into the Midwest. Pittsburgh-based PNC is Dayton's second-largest bank, with local deposits of about $2.63 billion, according to June 2009 figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The branch conversion process occurred in four phases beginning in November 2009. It concluded the weekend of June 11-13, with the fourth segment covering 1.6 million customers and 390 branches in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin and parts of Indiana.

All told, the process involved more than 6 million customers and 1,300 branches. It ranks among the four largest bank branch conversions in United States banking history and certainly was the largest for PNC. It was completed more than six months ahead of PNC’s initial projections.

PNC said the conversion was completed without any major issues: how did this come out so well?

“We had a team that was half PNC, half National City. It really brought together people who knew what they were doing. There was a lot of planning, a lot of training — five million training hours. When we had the first conversion wave (Western Pennsylvania, Florida and Columbus, Ohio, in November 2009), we figured what we could do differently and what went wrong. We had that discipline after each wave. Everyone was in the game: We have the buddy system on conversion weekends where people from other markets go over and spend the weekend with the converted market to make sure we got it right.”

Prior to converting branches, you visited the markets and PNC announced many charitable donations and initiatives. Did this help to get your name out and to give regions a better understanding of PNC?

“You can do that a lot faster than you can do the conversions. We give the local troops in each market a budget because they understand which charitable organizations are valuable in their community. Banks are community organizations, at least in our minds, and it’s important for us to focus on the community. It’s critical that you do business with people in the community, we’re inextricably linked.”

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Cleveland, National City’s headquarters city, was in the second wave of conversions. Was that difficult?

“We were welcomed in Cleveland. I will tell you that National City was having a difficult time and the community and newspapers knew it, so there was an understanding that National City was not going to remain independent. For the most part, (PNC) didn’t have anything in Cleveland, just two people in a small office.”

Cleveland is your hometown, so was there any personal significance for you to have operations there?

“The night we shook hands and signed the deal, it was a serendipitous moment. The National City headquarters building was across the street from where my grandfather had his restaurant and a block and a half from my father’s restaurant. So we signed the deal at 1 a.m., and I was standing on Ninth Street and thinking, ‘Oh, my Lord, what have I done?’ It just struck me, standing on that spot, so many years later.”

E-mail dayton@bizjournals.com. Call (937) 528-4400.

Read more: PNC Financial Services Group CEO Jim Rohr Q&A about National City conversion - Dayton Business Journal