ABN AMRO's Ascent.

Michigan-based ABN AMRO Mortgage Group is having a great year. The mortgage banking conglomerate recently bought the Web name "mortgage.com" and moved its National Lending Center into the high-tech space occupied by the former mortgage dot-com in Florida. With business booming also at its huge wholesaler, lnterFirst, everything is looking sunny.

WHEN WILLIAM NEWMAN HANDS OUT HIS BUSINESS CARD, HE HAS A CHOICE. He could give the one that reads executive vice president of ABN AMRO Mortgage Group Inc. (AAMG) or he can give his InterFirst Wholesale Mortgage Lending card, which is also appropriate since he's president of that company.

It's a little complicated, but does make some sense since InterFirst is a division of ABN AMRO Mortgage Group, Ann Arbor, Michigan. To company outsiders, however, the proliferation of names for different business units is sometimes confusing--and it has gotten even more complicated as ABN AMRO Mortgage in December acquired the mortgage.com URL from the defunct company of the same name and is using that site as its e-commerce venture.

Now the header of the company's Internet site reads mortgage.com, with a subhead in smaller type reading, "by ABN AMRO," and Newman's second business card also reads "InterFirst Wholesale, a division of ABN AMRO Mortgage Group Inc." --and with that, the company hopes clients and consumers get the message that it is all just one big, happy family.

The mortgage group, an indirect subsidiary of Dutch banking giant ABN AMRO N.V., was formed in 1999 from several entities that had previously been consolidated for management purposes in 1997, "and now we are trying to establish a brand," says Ursula Crenshaw, a senior vice president of marketing for AAMG. "I'm not saying it's not a challenge, but we are beginning to make some headway."

Part of the problem is that ABN AMRO--although it is the sixth-largest bank in the world, with total assets of more than $505 billion and operations in 70 countries--does not have a large "footprint" in the United States, so it has been reluctant to alter existing names that are familiar to customers. Why change all company divisions to an ABN AMRO brand, when it is likely, at this point, the name doesn't carry a lot of weight in this country?

Yet, things are different on the corporate level. ABN AMRO's U.S. operation is called ABN AMRO North America Inc. The Chicago-based holding company boasts assets of $170 billion and more than 18,000 employees, one of its primary subsidiaries being AAMG--which contributes 20 percent to 25 percent of the profits for the North American banking unit.