We’re so excited to share with you that our new website is taking off this weekend. We couldn’t be happier. And you should be too.
Our new website makes it easier than ever to find banks with DBAs (doing business as another name). This will make it infinitely easier to get the correct rating on a bank or banks that operate under more than one name. You may be surprised by how many there are. In fact, we have a list of more than 350 banks operating under trade names included in this issue.
Some of them you already know about because they’re listed in JRN, like 5-Star TIAA Bank, Jacksonville, FL which does business as EverBank and 4-Star Texas Capital Bank, N.A., Dallas, TX that does business as bankdirect.com.
But take former listee 5-Star Glacier Bank, MT for example. Glacier Bank operates under 12 other names! It does NOT have 12 times the amount of FDIC deposit insurance. An unsuspecting depositor could conceivably find themselves with literally millions of dollars in uninsured deposits if they believed each DBA had separate insurance. That’s why it’s so important to keep track of your deposits.
The new bauerfinancial.com makes it even easier to do so by including the FDIC certificate number alongside the bank name. Deposit insurance coverage is determined by that number, regardless of the trade name.
In the event of a merger, deposits generally retain their insured status until the first maturity date (in the case of CDs) or for six months after the merger to give depositors enough time to transfer funds if they have duplicate accounts at the combined bank.
Some trade names are merely abbreviations for ease of use. 5-Star Manufacturers and Traders in NY, which also does business as M&T Bank and 5-Star Dedham Institute for Savings, MA which goes simply by Dedham Savings are good examples of this. A number of others do the same thing and they are fairly easy to identify. But Bauer doesn’t want it to be fairly easy. We want it to be virtually impossible to select the wrong bank.
Let’s look at Arizona, for example. After years of consolidation, only 5 banks still call Arizona their home. However, scores more operate branches in The Grand Canyon State. Our old website did a pretty good job of listing the out-of-state banks that operate there, but the new site does even better. Not only do we now list the FDIC certificate number, we are also providing all known DBAs on bauerfinancial.com.
Now, if you look up Arizona Business Bank believing, as the name suggests, that it is headquartered in Arizona, not only will you find Arizona Business Bank and its rating, you will also discover that it is a trade name for Cobiz Bank headquartered in Colorado. You will also be armed with its FDIC certificate number for record keeping.
There are still plenty of banks that operate under the same name or similar names, that you should be aware of. In fact, nearly 100 are named simply “First National Bank”. With our new site, as you type in the bank name, a list of possibilities will appear. Continue typing and the list gets smaller until you can easily see the one you’re after.
The same holds true for the trade names. Case in point, Farmers and Merchants Bank in NC and Farmers & Merchants Bank of Central California both go by F&M Bank. That seems perfectly logical, given their names, but some are not so straight forward.
First Citizens Bank in NC acquired Guaranty Bank in WI about a year ago. It still operates the acquired branches as Guaranty Bank. This is a common practice and is completely legal. It helps an acquiring bank when entering a new market that may not be familiar with its name to keep a certain continuity. Sometimes the old name is eventually phased out, but not always. No matter. Guaranty Bank can still be found in Wisconsin. It is listed as Guaranty Bank, a trade name for First Citizens Bank along with the star-rating, FDIC Certificate number and a link to the website.
This issue includes a list of Bank DBAs, listed alphabetically by Trade or Alias name. While it is not guaranteed to be complete, it’s a really great reference. We have even included website addresses when the website name is not obvious to the bank name, like igobanking.com, a website for Flushing Bank in NY and IncredibleBank.com, one of the websites belonging to River Valley Bank, WI, which also operates through the much more obvious rivervalleybank.com.
If you see any we missed, feel free to email them to jumboratenews@bauerfinancial.com. In fact, any comments or suggestions are welcome, too. We’d love to hear from you.