NEW YORK, July 6 (Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) on Monday said it plans to expand the securities business it largely inherited when it bought Wachovia Corp, signaling its commitment to an area that has been recovering from last year's credit market seizure.
The fourth-largest U.S. bank will emphasize debt and equity underwriting, mergers and acquisitions, loan syndications, debt and equity sales and trading, municipal securities and some derivatives, while eschewing the proprietary trading and other risky businesses that caused big losses for many rivals.
Wells Fargo also took another step toward shedding the Wachovia name, renaming its securities unit Wells Fargo Securities from Wachovia Securities. Two months earlier, the bank renamed its brokerage unit, which had also been known as Wachovia Securities, as Wells Fargo Advisors.
Wells Fargo was not available for comment. In the January-to-June period, the San Francisco-based bank ranked 28th in global debt and equity underwriting and 18th in merger advising, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Higher profits from the securities business could help Wells Fargo bolster equity, after it wrote off $37.2 billion of Wachovia's loan book when it acquired that Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender for $12.5 billion at year end.
Wells Fargo recently sold $8.6 billion of stock to help fill a $13.7 billion buffer required by U.S. regulators under a "stress test," and plans to generate the rest internally. The bank previously took $25 billion from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Rob Engel and Jonathan Weiss are leading Wells Fargo's investment banking and capital markets business, while John Shrewsberry is leading its securities and investment group, which focuses on corporate and institutional clients. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel, Editing by Maureen Bavdek)
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