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July 16, 2007
PNC Financial Services Group is cutting more than 450 jobs at three Maryland locations of Mercantile Bankshares Corp., which it bought in March for $6 billion.
The layoffs at Mercantile, Maryland’s largest banking chain, involve 323 workers in Linthicum, 80 in Baltimore and 51 in Frederick, according to notices PNC filed with the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. The cuts are scheduled to be made by Aug. 17.
Employees who ‘‘face the public” at Mercantile’s 240 banking offices, however, will retain their positions, as well as some others whose jobs were initially targeted for elimination, said PNC spokesman Frederick K. Solomon.
‘‘We moved into the area to expect growth and if there is growth we may need some of those employees,” Solomon said.
Some employees in Mercantile’s out-of-state branches in Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania may also lose their jobs in the conversion to PNC.
Solomon said it is ‘‘just good business” to keep familiar faces at branches to face customers.
‘‘In our intention to acquire Mercantile, we said that we intend to realize $100 million in cost savings — about half of that in employees,” Solomon said.
Solomon said most of the positions to be eliminated in Linthicum are ‘‘back-office processing jobs” that most likely will be shifted to PNC headquarters in Pittsburgh or its offices in Kentucky. He said the Baltimore office will remain open but did not know about the Frederick office.
The deal is ‘‘very strategic” for PNC, Solomon said.
‘‘It provided us with a mid-Atlantic franchise from the Hudson River in the north to the Potomac in the south,” he said. PNC is now in eight states and Washington, D.C.
Mercantile has almost 3,700 employees, with nearly 80 percent in Maryland. Meanwhile, PNC is just entering the state and has more than 16,000 employees in its 850 offices, 10 of which are in Maryland. As of Dec. 31, Mercantile had $17.7 billion in assets. Mercantile officials could not be reached for comment.
Most bank acquisitions have resulted in some job cuts. Since Mercantile bought Farmers and Mechanics in 2003 for about $500 million, the latter has seen its workforce decline from 700 to about 450, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
PNC is in the process of changing all Mercantile properties to its brand, but its signs will remain covered until September, Solomon said.
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