Feb. 10--Since PNC Financial Services Group swallowed up troubled National City Corp. at year-end, it largely has been business as usual for National City's branch banking customers.

That doesn't mean changes aren't coming.

PNC expects to have deals in place by the beginning of next month for the 61 National City offices in Western Pennsylvania that it is unloading to settle antitrust concerns. Fifty of the branches, located in the five-county Pittsburgh region, must go to a single buyer. PNC has said it expected to transfer the offices to the new owner around midyear.

The Pittsburgh-based bank also expects to shutter some offices where the two banks overlap, chiefly in Western Pennsylvania and southwestern Ohio. In some areas, it could be a PNC office that closes instead of National City's, depending on which is better situated. In any case, customers will receive a minimum 90-day notice of an impending closure, the bank said. PNC also has promised to redeploy affected branch managers and employees who report directly to those managers, a spokesman said.

And sometime during the latter half of this year, PNC, now the nation's fifth-largest bank, plans to begin the huge task of converting National City's customer accounts to PNC's computer systems in a process that is expected to take until the end of 2010.

All of the changes have been unsettling to more than a few customers.

"What's going to happen to the customers who didn't open up all their accounts at the same time and place?" one stressed National City customer asked recently in an e-mail to the Post-Gazette. "Some of my accounts with National City are slated to move to PNC, while others are scheduled to go to 'a bank to be named later.' What a hassle!"

It's understandable for customers to be anxious, industry experts say.

"It feels like such uncertainty," Elizabeth Rowe of Mercator Advisory Group in Boston said.

While there have been some high-profile cases in which acquirers have botched customer accounts during the conversion process, banks have learned from those mistakes, she said.

"It is a disaster for an acquiring bank if there are any glitches in the conversion," Ms. Rowe said. "If the ATM network goes down, or new checks aren't delivered before the account numbers are changed, that's when customers leave."

In the case of PNC, conversions are nothing new. The National City deal was PNC's fourth acquisition in just the last two years.

The others include Lancaster-based Sterling Financial Corp.; Yardville National Bancorp of Hamilton, N.J.; and Mercantile Bankshares of Baltimore.