Banks and other financial institutions have an annoying tendency to
buy each other up. I have one account that I set up with a particular
company that was, over the course of less than a decade, bought by
another company, then another, then another. This has happened 3 times
for that same account.

I prefer to keep my assets split up roughly in thirds so that any
disaster with any financial institution (whether it's account hacking
or ID theft or the bank going bust or whatever) will only cause me to
lose at most 1/3 of my money.

The problem is that I never know which institution owns what bank. For
all I know, all my accounts could be owned by the same bank.

Is there someplace that lists all the major bank and investment
websites (etrade, citibank, etc.) and who owns what? I'd like to open
a new investment account and I want to make sure it's at a bank that
does not own any of my existing accounts.

Does not matter who owns the bank.  You could have separate accounts
in the bank and with FDIC insurance you wouldn't lose any money.  Go
to the FDIC website for more information.

But, FDIC wouldn't cover identity theft or account hacking. It also
doesn't apply to investment and/or money market accounts. If the bank
that has my checking account goes under then FDIC will cover me (up to
100k). But, they're not going to cover me if someone steals my
password and drains my account.

I prefer to maximize safety when the inconvenience isn't that large.

Well I am a long time programmer
- I have written Webservers and On-Line bots

I would stay a long way away from Internet Banking.

Hi mixnmatch--

FDIC does apply to money market accounts-- these are simply a
higher-interest savings account. I think you mean that they don't
apply to money market funds.

Personally, I think you should just use common sense forms of identity
protection-- do you have a safe password? I mean, really safe. Not
anything that you use for anything else. Something with capital and
lower case, and numbers and letters, with no words in it.  Do you
change it once in a while? Have you switched to online statements that
you get in your email? I believe that that's safer than receiving them
in the mail. Do you have a username that's the same as your name? Get
rid of it and use something totally unrelated. Do you ever put in your
details on a wireless network that's unencrypted? Do not do that.
Secure any connections and don't trust anything that's not encrypted.
Don't write your passwords down on a piece of paper in your house that
anyone working in your house could see (I know many people that do
this).  Never use your password on a public computer or on a friend's
computer (you never know when there might just be a keylogger on that
machine.)

Do you use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer? IE has huge security
vulnerabilities that are just waiting to be exploited by someone. Use
Firefox instead. (Or you could use Opera, but I prefer Firefox.)

Do you update your computer regularly? All your programs? I mean ALL.
Winamp, AIM, small programs like that come out with updates all the
time after security vulnerabilities.  Set them all to automatically
update and check betanews.com daily for new releases of your programs.
 Do you have a good antivirus? Use Avast (avast.com; it's free) or
Nod32 rather than crappy ones like Norton, Symantec and McAfee which
create problems on your computer.

I would trust online banking over regular banking any day, because you
don't get any account statements in the mail, unguarded and ready to
be stolen by anyone.  That's my personal preference.  Encrypt your
email, in addition, if you're worried about that.

On many banks, you can also have alerts set up that go to your email
if a transaction is over a certain amount or if a certain number of
transactions are made in one day.

If you don't make any of these common mistakes that people make with
their passwords, you should be safe.

--keystroke-ga

The following website has information about bank holding company
parent companies, their subsidiaries and other non-bank companies

http://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubweb/nicweb/nichome.aspx

To avoid having your bank combine with another I would recommend
visiting the 'Top 50 Bank Holding Companies' page and selecting three
of these large institutions.  These are less likely to be acquired
than smaller institutions and if they are acquired you are more likely
to be informed about it through standard news sources.  i.e. large
mergers make national news.

Good luck with your diversification.