It was the third-biggest banking merger the US had seen, behind last year's mergers of Chase Manhattan with Chemical Bank, and Wells Fargo with Interstate, and was greeted with a wave of speculation that a group of medium-sized banks in the mid-west and the south were now in play.
Retail banking in the US is highly fragmented, an enduring legacy of legislation enacted after the 1930s depression to prevent another wide-scale banking collapse. Banks tend to be localised, with small branch networks; automated teller machines (ATMs) are less widespread than in Europe, and cheques are not as widely accepted.
NationsBank, which will now overtake J.P. Morgan to become the fourth-largest US bank, is in the forefront of the movement towards larger, diversified regional banks. It claims to be the closest to being a ''national'' retail bank in the US, with a presence in 16 states, as well as in the District of Columbia.
Boatmen's has given it a toe-hold west of the Mississippi, away from its centres in the Carolinas, Florida and Texas. Hugh McColl, NationsBank's combative chief executive, last week ruled out further big acquisitions in the near future. Just as it had spent the last four years integrating systems from its last round of big purchases, the task now is to merge the two banks' operations, and apply new technology.
