Fleet's oldest predecessor was The Massachusetts Bank founded in 1784. The Massachusetts Bank was the first federally chartered joint-stock owned bank in the United States and only the second bank to receive a charter in the United States. The bank's charter was signed by
John Hancock and among its early account holders were such notable figures as
Paul Revere,
Samuel Adams,
John Hancock and
Henry Knox. The bank's founders were largely made up of merchants who wanted to use a U.S., rather than British bank to send money abroad. It was first headquartered at the old
Manufactory House, near Boston Common. The bank was the only bank in the city of Boston until the Union Bank (later the
Bank of New England) was founded in 1792. This bank became
BankBoston which merged into Fleet in 1999. Fleet's direct predecessor began in
Providence, Rhode Island in 1791 as the
Providence Bank, founded by Rhode Island businessman
John Brown. It joined the national banking system in 1865 as Providence National Bank. In 1951, it bought Union Trust Company to form Providence Union Bank and Trust Company. Three years later, it bought Industrial Trust Company to form Industrial National Bank. In 1968, it became the leading subsidiary of Industrial National Corporation. Industrial began diversifying into non-bank financial services in the mid-1970s. To reflect this, it changed its name to Fleet Financial Group in 1982, with the banking subsidiary becoming Fleet National Bank. It then began an aggressive buying spree of banks outside Rhode Island, most notably the
Bank of New England in 1991. In 1988, Fleet merged with Albany, New York–based Norstar Bancorp to form Fleet/Norstar Financial Group. The bank continued to operate as Norstar in New York until 1992, when the company readopted the Fleet Financial Group name. , located at a current Bank of America location in Boston. Fleet was already one of the three largest banks in New England, together with
Shawmut National Corporation and its largest affiliate Shawmut Bank, and Bank of Boston. Despite this, state and federal regulators allowed Fleet to merge with Shawmut in 1995. The merger created the largest bank in New England, with over 30 percent of the region's deposits. It was also the ninth largest in the United States. Although Fleet was the surviving company, the merged bank was based at Shawmut's old headquarters at
One Federal Street in Boston. In 1996, Fleet acquired the
US branch network (in New York and New Jersey) of the British
National Westminster Bank. In 1998, Fleet acquired Quick & Reilly discount brokerage and their deep-discount, online subsidiary
Suretrade. Fleet's biggest merger came in 1999, when it acquired
BankBoston (which was itself the fruit of a 1996 merger between Bank of Boston and BayBank). The new FleetBoston was the culmination of a series of Boston-area bank mergers that combined several smaller banks into a single large institution. FleetBoston was the seventh-largest bank in the
United States, as measured by assets (
US$197 billion in 2003). It had almost 50,000 employees, over 20 million customers worldwide and revenues of $12 billion per year. The banking subsidiary operated under the Fleet name, but used BankBoston's stylized eagle logo. Corporate headquarters moved to BankBoston's former headquarters at
100 Federal Street. As a condition for merger, regulators required Fleet to divest 306 New England branches, including 28 to community banks. In 2000, Fleet acquired New Jersey–based
Summit Bancorp which had previously operated as UJB Financial before acquiring Summit in 1996. The same year, Fleet sold 278 of its New England branches to
Sovereign Bank as a part of the divestiture plan required by regulators to allow the 1999 acquisition of
BankBoston. After
Bank of America acquired Fleet in 2004, its overall
Customer Satisfaction Index (as measured by the
University of Michigan), was lowered from 74 to 72. Bank of America devoted considerable resources to improving its New England branches' reputation for customer service, establishing customer call centers and hiring more tellers per branch. Fleet's former headquarters now serves as the base for Bank of America's New England operations. ==Sponsorships==