DTCC expansion will add 255 jobs to New Tampa site
April 15, 2013
Michael Sasso | The Tampa Tribune
This city catches grief for its bevy of low-wage call centers, but it has scored a major coup with the expansion of financial services giant Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
DTCC announced Monday that it chose Tampa over New Jersey and other sites to add up to 255 jobs to its existing pool of 590 employees in New Tampa. The jobs’ total compensation when including health insurance and bonuses will be nearly $100,000 apiece, said Eric Miller, managing director of DTCC in New Tampa.
More than just the obvious benefits to the local economy, DTCC’s expansion signals that Tampa has the brains and talent for more sophisticated work, said Rick Homans, chief executive of the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp.
“It really makes a statement about the quality of the workforce in Hillsborough County,” Homans said. “We’re much more than a back-office, customer-support center in Tampa Bay.”
DTCC is a backbone of America’s financial markets, doing behind-the-scenes processing for trillions of dollars of stock, bond, mutual fund and options trades. The company boasts that last year it processed securities trades worth $1.6 quadrillion – that’s $1.6 trillion multiplied by a thousand.
It first entered the Tampa Bay area in 2004, when it chose Tampa over Atlanta to build its Southern Business Center. The company started looking in the South because it wanted to diversify its locations so that its critical financial operations wouldn’t come to a halt if a major storm or catastrophe hit.
State and local officials were giddy at the time about landing such a sophisticated Wall Street operation and awarded DTCC $6 million in financial incentives. About 300 of DTCC’s original 500 employees in New Tampa relocated from its Northern facilities.
Miller said the company expects to hire the new employees over three years in a range of technology and financial positions, including software engineers, financial and operations specialists, and internal auditing. The hires will bump up its workforce in New Tampa to more than 850 people.
DTCC’s out-of-state employees will be able to apply for the jobs, but Miller expected most to come from the Tampa area. Information about the positions can be found at www.dtcc.com/careers.
Driving DTCC’s expansion is a wave of new regulations in the financial services industry requiring banks and brokerages to keep vast amounts of new data, much of it required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Meantime, the growth of complicated “derivatives” – such as options and credit default swaps – requires a company such as DTCC to track them all.
Tampa won the expansion over DTCC’s other facilities in New York, New Jersey, Dallas and Washington, D.C., partly because the company has had such a positive experience here in the past eight years, Miller said. Local colleges have helped prepare students with the financial and technological skills used in financial services, Miller said.
He expects to be able to find enough talented people locally to fill the jobs.
“We’re very confident in that,” he said. “We’ve been impressed with some of the local talent.”
To be sure, the outsourcing or “offshoring” of jobs overseas, as well as automation, have eaten away at millions of back-office and administrative jobs nationwide. Miller said DTCC has several offices around the world and continually evaluates where to locate and find employees.
When asked whether employees in Tampa should worry about jobs being relocated, Miller mentioned no plans to do so, but he cautioned that employees should always keep ahead of the competition.
“I just think employees need to keep improving their skill sets,” he said.
State and local governments awarded DTCC economic incentives worth more than $4 million to get it to expand here. The money included an upfront grant of about $1.2 million from the state’s Quick Action closing Fund and $1.78 million from a tax refund program paid after DTCC creates the jobs.
