CoreStates Financial Corporation
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| Industry | Bank holding company |
|---|---|
| Fate | Acquired by First Union Corporation |
| Successor | Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) |
| Founded | 1803 (As "The Philadelphia Bank") |
| Defunct | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Philadelphia |
| Products | Financial services |
CoreStates Financial Corporation, previously known as Philadelphia National Bank (PNB), was a United States bank holding company in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area.
The bank was renamed in the mid-1980s after a series of mergers. After being acquired by First Union Corporation, which later merged with Wachovia National Bank, CoreStates Financial Corporation became a part of Wells Fargo in 2008 due to the Wachovia-Wells Fargo merger.
The bank was founded in Philadelphia on September 8, 1803, as The Philadelphia Bank. George Clymer was the bank's first president. Later, the bank became known as Philadelphia National Bank, or PNB.
During the early years of the United States, Philadelphia developed as the banking center of the country. The First Bank of the United States chartered in 1791, was based in the city until its charter expired in 1811 and was purchased by Stephen Girard and then renamed Girard Bank for its founder. The Second Bank of the United States was directed for most of the period 1816 to 1836 by Nicholas Biddle, the nation's first chief banker and scion of the city's most iconic family.
The Philadelphia National Bank was neither the oldest nor the most aggressive of the big banks headquartered in the nation's birthplace for most of the city's history; that title went to the First Pennsylvania Bank, the "Pennsy Company", founded a generation earlier in 1784 and led in the twentieth century by an increasingly ambitious and risk-taking board of directors. PNB, on the other hand, maintained a reputation for financial caution, civic responsibility, and, not coincidentally, social exclusiveness. On occasion, the bank made headlines for quiet innovations, such as when during the late 1960s it led all the nation's banks in ending the practice of "redlining" poorer neighborhoods so that personal and small business loans could be extended to residents of poorer city districts, or when, during the middle 1970s, the bank helped universalize ATM banking by building one of the nation's first and largest network of banking machines, known by their acronym, "MAC", for Money Access Center.
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