re: Wachovia keeping its own identity.

It's temporary. Bank mergers and acquisitions are usually planned for several months before the first steps are executed. Because of the circumstances in this case, W-F bought first and is now working through making them one company.

FWIW and based on nothing more scientific than this Wachovian's gut feeling, W-F looks to be a better company to work for, and happier employees usually have happier customers.

@kamikasee: Definitely not the USAA I know. Call back. It'll get fixed.

Incidentally, picking on Lanty is largely misplaced. He stepped in as interim CEO when Ken Thompson was asked to leave only last month. And Ken may have taken more of the fall than was really his sole due, but I suspect he'll land on his feet.

Haven't bothered to read the other comments, just wanted to throw in a kudo for USAA. I've been with them since I was a teenager--let's just round that to 20 years--and I've never had a real complaint.

Sprint bait-and-switched me about 8 days before everything changed, but that's a story for another time. (Yes, they actually tried to use 9/11 as an excuse when I called to cancel.) So I went Nextel, because my earlier Cingular (via Nokia) connectivity had been so bad. I wasn't pleased to hear about the merger.

But since then, Sprint's been good to me. On one call, some tech-ish person I talked to knocked $10 off my monthly bill just because she saw an available discount on my internet connectivity. If customer service went from "a priority at Nextel to an afterthought at Sprint," that may tell us that they're still maintaining separate call pools for at least some customers.