Citibank

Citibank was founded in 1812 as City Bank of New York. In 1894 it became the largest bank in the United States. In 1902 it began expanding internationally and became the first major U.S. bank to establish a foreign department. By 1930 it became the largest bank in the world with 100 branches in 23 countries outside the United States. It changed its name to The First National City Bank of New York in 1955, then again to First National City Bank in 1962, and to Citibank in 1976. In 1981, Citibank chartered a South Dakota subsidary to take advantage of new laws that raised the state's maximum permissible interest rate on loans to 25 percent (then the highest in the nation).

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Citibank was one of the first U.S. banks to introduce Automatic teller machines in the 1970s, in order to reduce the number of human tellers and give 24-hour access to accounts.

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Citibank's operations in California are fairly recent, since it bought out Cal-Fed back in 2001. Also in 2001 Citibank settled a lawsuit for improperly assessing late fees. The class action lawsuit was for 45 million dollars. Following this Citibank lobbied in Congress to pass legislation that would limit class action lawsuits to 5 million dollars unless they were initiated on a federal level. Many consumer advocate websites report that Citibank is still improperly assessing late fees.

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Citibank is now the consumer and corporate banking arm of financial services giant Citigroup, the largest company of its kind in the world. Citibank has operations in more than 50 countries around the world. More than half of its 1,400 offices are in the United States, mostly in the New York City, Chicago, Miami, and Washington DC metropolitan areas, as well as in California.

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In addition to the standard banking transactions, Citibank offers insurance, credit card and investment products. Their online services division is among the most successful in the field, claiming about 15 million users.

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1812: :This article is about the year 1812. For the overture by Tchaikovsky, see 1812 Overture....

1894: 1894 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar)....

Bank: The essential function of a bank is to provide services related to the storing of deposits and the extending of credit. The evolution of banking dates back to the earliest writing, and continues in the present where a bank is a financial institution that provides banking and other financial services...