Capital One leaving Sioux Falls; 750 losing jobs

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I thought the credit card companies were located in South Dakota because the laws were written to permit the interest rates they charged. I don't know what has changed.

Capital One leaving Sioux Falls; 750 losing jobs

Jodi Schwan and Steve Young 7:25 p.m. CDT July 23, 2015

Capital One Financial Corp. is leaving Sioux Falls and eliminating hundreds of jobs in the city.

As of Thursday, the Virginia-based company has 750 employees, making it among the city's largest employers. In March, when the company last reported staffing, there were 850 employees. That ranked Capital One as the city's 10th largest private employer.

"Capital One is shifting our call center strategy to allow us to become nimble, flexible and scalable to meet our customer needs," company spokeswoman Julie Rakes said Thursday. "We have made the difficult decision to close our Sioux Falls site by the end of 2015 and will be moving the work to our other locations within our network."

At the company's 2012 ribbon-cutting, Dan Mortensen, senior vice president of corporate real estate and HR operations, praised the location and called Sioux Falls "a sizable part of our Capital One operations footprint." ... Capital One entered the Sioux Falls market more than three years ago with the purchase of HSBC's credit card operations.

[think]

1. Article says they are closing a call center in Oregon also. They'll probably outsource them all...

[misterhighwasted]

2. Where are they going??? Souix Falls doesn't have the market to support 750 unemployed people.

This is a serious blow to that community.
Doubt the South Dakota Red State Gov will do more than provide mea culpa's.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Maybe this is why:

July 18, 2012 6:58 p.m. ET
Capital One Financial Corp. will pay $210 million to settle allegations that the large U.S. credit-card issuer allowed its call-center contractors to pressure customers into buying consumer-credit-protection products such as identity-theft-monitoring services.

The CFPB said Capital One's telephone vendors used deceptive marketing tactics to pressure or mislead consumers seeking to activate their credit cards into paying for "add-on products" such as payment protection, in which companies make payments for consumers in case of job loss or major illness, and credit monitoring, which confers regular access to credit scores and fraud warnings.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Capital One's primary federal regulator, said Capital One violated the Federal Trade Commission Act, which bars deceptive and unfair trade practices.

Customers "were pressured or misled into buying credit-card products they didn't understand, didn't want or in some cases, couldn't even use," Richard Cordray, the consumer bureau's director, said at a news conference. "We are putting companies on notice that these deceptive practices are against the law and will not be tolerated."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304217904577534782507899336

[dumbcat]

6. What does that have to do with Sioux Falls?

That was a federal rap.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. If they are cutting costs, they might be moving to cheaper digs.

[prairierose]

3. I suspect they are outsourcing the...

last of their call centers. The credit card companies moved here in 1980 due to the changes in laws governing interest on credit cards. I think now they are just getting rid of all American bases operations to increase their profits. This will be bad for Sx Falls and SD. However, they do have a growing start up movement and community there and that is starting to create some good jobs but that is a slow process and certainly can't absorb 750 unemployed fast.

[Fuddnik]

4. More likely, they used up the public and tax incentives that brought them there.

Jeb Bush gave them a package worth millions to move to Tampa, back around 2004. As soon as they gobbled up the freebies, and the tax incentives weren't lucrative enough, they packed up everything except the auto loan division and moved elsewhere, by 2007 or 2008.

The Pizza-Italian carryout I had there did a booming lunch delivery business with them. Wellcare moved in and picked up some of their slack, but not enough.