PNC Financial Services - PNC Bank

PNC Bank

PNC Bank NA. is the principal subsidiary of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PNC Bank offers consumer and corporate services in over 2,500 branches in Alabama, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, & Wisconsin. PNC owns about 35% of publicly traded fund manager BlackRock, which specializes in fixed-income products. BlackRock merged with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in October 2006, and is now co-owned between PNC, Bank of America, and Barclays. BlackRock's ties to PNC are evident in that company's logo, as they use the same typeface as PNC does in its own logo.

In June 2003, PNC Bank agreed to pay $115 million to settle federal securities fraud charges after one of its subsidiaries fraudulently transferred $762 million in bad loans and other venture-capital investments to an AIG entity in order to conceal them from investors. PNC acquired the former United National Bancorp based in Bridgewater, New Jersey in 2004, and later announced that it would buy the Riggs National Bank which operated in the Washington, DC, area. Among other offenses, Riggs had aided Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in laundering money. PNC successfully completed the acquisition of Riggs in 2005 after the banks resolved a disagreement on the acquisition price.

PNC Bank was forced to reissue hundreds of debit cards to customers in March 2006 when their account information was compromised. In the same month, PNC Bank was sued by Paul Bariteau who was an investor in the Military Channel. Bariteau claimed PNC let the channel’s chairman make unauthorized withdrawals of millions of dollars from the channel's account for personal use. The counter-claim is that Bariteau was only trying to recoup losses from a bad investment.

In April 2006, the J.D. Power Consumer Center released the results of its New York Retail Banking Satisfaction Study indicating that PNC Bank had an average number of satisfied customers. PNC has also subcontracted with Nationwide Bank and Washington Federal to process their home equity and auto loans. The operation sends out bulk mailings with offers and has call centers in Pittsburgh, PA and Kalamazoo, MI to handle this, and other PNC Bank customer service and sales calls.

In the fall of 2006, PNC announced its purchase of Mercantile Bankshares, a Maryland bank with an extensive branch network throughout suburban D.C., Baltimore and northern Virginia. On September 17, 2007, PNC successfully completed the merger with Mercantile, making PNC the 8th largest bank in the United States by deposits.

On August 14, 2009, PNC took over Dwelling House Savings & Loan and its only location in Pittsburgh's Hill District after Dwelling House failed and was placed under receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Although PNC was still in the process of integrating National City into its own system at the time, the bank agreed to assume all of Dwelling House's assets, and the branch became a PNC branch on August 17. Dwelling House had been known in Pittsburgh to provide low-income African Americans loans that other banks would deny, and had fended off receivership from the FDIC as recently as June 2009 through community fundraisers. PNC closed the former Dwelling House branch shortly after assuming Dwelling House's assets, with accounts transferred to the pre-existing PNC branch in the Hill District. The failure of Dwelling House is the only bank failure in Pennsylvania—a state otherwise relatively stable with banks—since the beginning of the financial crisis of 2007–2010, although two out-of-state banks with strong Pennsylvanian ties (National City and Wachovia) were reportedly close to failing at the time they were acquired by PNC and Wells Fargo, respectively.

On July 30, 2012, PNC announced plans to put ATMs in 138 Harris Teeter grocery stores in the Carolinas.