THREE WAYS THIS MATTERS TO YOU
NEW JOBS: The Barclaycard call center opening in Hamilton promises to create 1,500 jobs over the next several years.
Not only is that the single largest announcement for new job creation in at least a decade in the city, it’s one of the largest job-creating business projects of the last decade statewide, according to Ohio Development Services Agency, which administers tax credit agreements with companies.
Hiring kicks off next month. A job fair is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9, according to the company.
Plans are to add up to 250 new employees during 2016, according to Barclaycard.
NEW INVESTMENT: The call center will open at Vora Technology Park, located at 101 Knightsbridge Dr., in Hamilton.
Locals will recognize the address as what was once the former headquarters of Champion Paper in Hamilton and a tour Monday of the space shows Barclaycard will fill some empty offices once occupied by the paper mill’s top administration.
More than $9 million will be invested in renovations and finishes, said Mahendra Vora, founder of Vora Ventures, a portfolio of technology companies and the property owner.
Many factors including a quality building for a low price, the building size and access to talent drew Barclaycard’s new call center to Butler County, Vora said.
NEW INDUSTRY: Barclaycard joins another company, Colorado-based StarTek Inc., in announcing plans in 2015 to open a call center in Hamilton.
In the span of less than a year, a combined over 2,000 customer service jobs have been committed to the city by the two companies.
Not only does that put Hamilton on the map for the contact center business, it also opens doors for educational opportunities in the field, Hamilton Mayor Pat Moeller told Journal-News on Monday.
Talks are already underway with area employers to maybe start a call center operations or customer service communication certificate program at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, says Linda Schaffeld, acting dean of the Business Technologies Division. Cincinnati’s State’s workforce development division could also offer classes or workshops to help teach needed skills such as telephone etiquette, rapport building and problem solving skills, Schaffeld said. No decisions have been made or programs launched yet, but stay tuned.
The deal to bring the Barclaycard US call center and 1,500 new jobs to Hamilton has been months in the making.
In fact, city economic development staff has been working to bring the Barclaycard call center to Hamilton for just as long as the other call center that opened this year in the city, they say.
Only, they didn't know it was Barclays Bank knocking when the first inquiry was received, city staff said. What started as a code name last fall grew to a building tour by December and culminated in Monday's announcement that the credit-card servicing company Barclaycard US will open a call center creating about 1,500 jobs at the Vora Technology Park.
“Having a Global Fortune (500) company locate 1,500 jobs is a game-changer, especially on the heels of iMFLUX, a wholly-owned subsidiary of P&G (another Global Fortune 500) locating almost 230 jobs in Hamilton by 2016,” said Hamilton City Manager Joshua Smith.
“Couple that with other recent big wins — ThyssenKrupp Bilstein, StarTek and Community First Solutions — and it starts to accomplish many of our objectives: provides jobs to Hamiltonians, supports our growing number of small businesses and brings young families to the immediate area,” Smith said.
In between the time the city fielded the first prospect from the project now known as Barclays and today, another international call center company — StarTek Inc. — announced plans to open in downtown Hamilton on High Street. The first employees started working at that location in July.
But for months, the city was working an even bigger deal than StarTek.
They weren’t even sure they were going to get Barclays until recent days, said Hamilton Economic Development Director Jody Gunderson.
When Barclays sought and received tax credits from the state for the project, the location was yet to be determined, which development officials know means they could still decide on your site or pull the plug and choose another location last minute.
“They were almost parallel projects other than the fact that we knew more about StarTek from the beginning,” Gunderson said.
Vora Technology Park’s almost ready-to-go building, centrally located between Cincinnati and Dayton, helped cinch the deal, according to Gunderson and Barclays officials.
Also, “there are only a few buildings of this size (about 365,000 square feet) in the Tri-state,” said Mahendra Vora, founder of Vora Ventures and owner of the office park on Knightsbridge Drive.
Barclaycard is growing, and when it began a nationwide search to determine the location of its fourth call center in the United States, it was seeking sites meeting the following criteria, said Larry Drexler, chief privacy officer for the company, a division of U.K.-based Barclays Bank: workforce; reliability of the area such as being outside an earthquake zone, or outside an area prone to hurricanes; and an American time zone different from its other call center locations in Delaware, Maine and Nevada.
The payments business provides customer service support for Barclays-branded credit cards, as well as card members who participate in the 25 co-branded credit card programs offered by the business, according to the company. Business growth is fueled by the growth of Barclays’ own payment products as well as new partnerships with other companies for which Barclays provides financing, Drexler said.
“We probably spent eight or nine months in the process of trying to locate our next call center,” Drexler said. “In order to continue to service our customers we need to be able to be prepared and that’s why we’re bringing out a new call center.”
Barclays was also seeking a site convenient to direct flights out of Philadelphia, and Hamilton’s location between two airports and not too far from Columbus was a plus, Drexler said.
“Our first cut was probably looking to smaller cities and that was because we like to have an impact on the communities in which we’re located. That was important to us,” he said.
The requirements whittled down the list of sites first to 40 possible locations, he said. From there, it was narrowed to five choices including the Greater Dayton area, he said.
“We started this with the notion that we would be online within months of the announcement and existing real estate was the way to go,” he said.
“We became strategically located in Hamilton between Cincinnati and Dayton to pull from both,” he said.
Hopes are for Barclaycard to begin training new hires in Hamilton by the end of the year and be up and running in January, he said. A minimum 250 jobs could be created next year before ramping up to the full 1,500 or so, he said.
“I thought this would happen but maybe over a longer period of time,” said Hamilton Mayor Patrick Moeller. “Customer service is something that we’re going to be known for but we’re also going to be known for making things… There’s going to be a huge buzz… about what’s happening in Hamilton, Ohio.”
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