Most of the branches that will close are located within a half mile of another First Union or Wachovia branch, First Union Chief Financial Officer Robert Kelly said. Kelly revealed the number of branch closings earlier this week during a presentation to analysts hosted by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. No branches will close until the end of 2002.
Banks use such centers to store customer account information on mainframe computers.
Neither First Union nor Wachovia will say which data center or how many people it employs. The highly secure locations typically don't employ many people but do house expensive technology. Wachovia has operations centers in six cities, including Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Raleigh and Columbia. Some of those operations centers are data centers, said Wachovia spokesman Jay Reed, declining to provide more detail. First Union operates a data center at its customer information center in Charlotte's University Research Park and another outside of Charlotte.