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Merged ‘Megabanks’ Face Compliance Culture Clashes, Training Challenges

By Brian Monroe

The mergers of some of the nation's largest banks, brokerages and mortgage lenders will mean turmoil in compliance departments due to employee redundancy and culture clashes, say bank officials. Since January 2008, nearly a dozen financial institutions, including Bank of America, Wachovia and JP Morgan, have merged into multi-trillion-dollar "megabanks" in efforts to shelter their assets from an economic downturn. The mergers have, at times, joined disparate business models, including large commercial banks with investment brokerages. But the scope and the speed of these "shotgun weddings" have left little time for the due diligence needed to analyze how the partnering...

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