Citigroup’s planned purchase of Wachovia’s banking operations won’t have an immediate effect on customers of its area branches, which are in North Georgia, a spokeswoman said Monday.

“What Wachovia customers need to know today is that there are absolutely no changes to their accounts,” said Evelyn Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Wachovia Corp.

Wachovia Securities, with an office in downtown Chattanooga, is not part of the sale. The brokerage firm was known formerly as A.G. Edwards & Co., which Wachovia bought in 2007 for $6.8 billion.

“Wachovia Securities was a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank — 32 percent owned by the Prudential, 62 percent owned by Wachovia Bank,” said Ward Petty, branch manager of the local office of Wachovia Securities.

Under the deal, Citigroup will pay $2.1 billion to Wachovia and assume the bank’s deposits. The bank’s headquarters will remain in Charlotte, N.C.

Wachovia, the nation’s fourth biggest bank, also is the largest in Dalton, Ga. with four offices which collectively had $455.1 million in deposits last year, according to the most recent FDIC data.

Wachovia has more Georgia bank branches in Fort Oglethorpe, Ringgold, LaFayette and Chatsworth.

Among its 3,386 offices around the globe, the bank has 286 bank locations in Georgia and 16 in Tennessee, all of which are open for business as usual, according to Wachovia.

“This combination with Citigroup has the full backing of the FDIC and the U.S. Treasury and all customers do have immediate access to their deposit funds, and there are no immediate changes for customers or employees in (the Chattanooga) market,” Ms. Mitchell said.

Citigroup and Wachovia will communicate any changes in the coming weeks and months, she said.

Jim Schutz, an analyst with Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc. in Birmingham, Ala., said he saw the move as a pre-emptive maneuver by the FDIC.

“They weren’t waiting to a point where Wachovia would ‘fail,’ but decided to get involved in an early acquisition and that would save them money on their fund,” he said.

The remainder of Wachovia, including its asset management, retail brokerage and certain select parts of its wealth management businesses, including Evergreen Asset Management, will continue to be a public company under the Wachovia name, according to a release issued by the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank.

Mr. Petty, because his office shares a name with the Wachovia, was getting calls Monday morning from concerned clients.

“I’m telling them that this is a big issue — not just the Wachovia situation, but the underlying economic environment we’re in — because we’re trying to place our trust in the government to do the right thing, and they don’t have a good track record,” Mr. Petty said.

Locally, the sale of Wachovia caused people to call their own banks looking for reassurance, officials said.

“The only impact it has on First Tennessee and other financial institutions and brokers is the continuing publicity from this event makes everybody take pause and re-examine their individual situations, said Frank Schriner, president of First Tennessee Bank. “We’re getting a lot of calls, but for the most part everybody is being pretty calm about it.”

Mr. Schriner said the good thing about the sale is that all the depositors were protected.

“All the deposits were assumed by Citigroup, so even the organizations that had millions in the bank, all their deposits were assumed by Citigroup, so they’re all in good shape,” he said.

Mr. Schriner emphasized that people with less than $100,000 in the bank — the limit of what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will insure — should be just fine. For those with more, the sales of Washington Mutual to JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia to Citigroup should show that in both cases all deposits were taken over, even those in the millions of dollars, he said.

“People just need to pause and look at the situation but they don’t need to panic,” Mr. Schriner said. “The only people who get hurt on a moving roller coaster are the ones who try to jump off early.”