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Washington Mutual

Company Background: Washington Mutual,áInc. together with its subsidiaries is a financial services company committed to serving individual customers as well as small to mid-sized businesses. Buying businesses to acquire customers has been a core business tactic for Washington Mutual and a successful growth strategy since 1983. The company completed thirty-three acquisitions and mergers in the last twenty years. However, it was largely unheard of until it acquired Irvine-based American Savings in 1996, followed by its purchases of Great Western Bank in 1997, and Home Savings in 1998. According to John Brinsley of Orange County Business Journal, these three acquisitions cost approximately $20 billion, but made the Seattle-based company the nation's largest savings and loan association (Brinsley, 2000, 8).

According to Heather Timmons of Business Week, since 1990, the company has completed more than twenty acquisitions, expanding into everything from lending to investments, and from insurance to financial advice. In doing so, what once was a small Seattle Thrift and Loan became the nation's seventh-largest bank, the nation's largest home lender, and a manager of over 200,000 investment accounts. Washington Mutual currently operates more than 2,400 consumer banking, mortgage lending, commercial banking, consumer finance and financial services offices nationwide. Between 1990 and 2001, total assets grew 25-fold, to more than $225 billion (Timmons, 2001, 54). Subsequently, assets have grown to more than $275 billion.

Over the last eight years, Washington Mutual has grown substantially, thanks in large part to the eight acquisitions listed and described below, in its effort to become the nation's leading retailer of consumer financial services:

Mortgage operations of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.(2)

Kerry Killinger, Washington Mutual's Chief Executive Officer stated in a teleconference in June of 2003 that Washingt...

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Washington Mutual. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:37, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688951.html