U.S. Bank has hired two former Wachovia bankers to create a Charlotte-based high-grade fixed income team and a national corporate banking group targeting the Southeastern U.S. The bank, headquartered in Minneapolis, expects to hire 30 employees for the office by the end of 2009.

Jim Kelligrew will lead the fixed-income group and manage employees in several other cities across the country. A former Wachovia Securities managing director and head of the Investment Grade unit within the Fixed Income Division, he was also managing director and head of Global High Grade Fixed Income at Bank of America. Before that he worked for the Fixed Income Division Lehman Brothers in New York and London. He’s a University of Michigan graduate.

Dee O’Dell, CFA, will head up the bank’s Southeast national corporate banking team, focusing on corporate clients with more than $250 million in sales across a 14-state territory of the Southeast.

O'Dell was a managing director in Wachovia's consumer and retail investment banking division. He’s a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College and has an MBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC - Chapel Hill.

Currently, U.S. Bank has 100 corporate and institutional trust employees in Charlotte.

Nearly two dozen banks and almost as many venture capital firms are headquartered in Charlotte, which ranks second in bank assets behind New York.

As they have in New York, Charlotte financial service companies shed jobs over the last year. Total financial services employment fell 9.4 percent there between April of 2008 and April to 2009, according to the North Carolina Employment Security Division.