Abbey National, the UK's second largest mortgage lender, is expanding its telesales operation in Belfast.
The bank's new purpose-built office near the city centre will open for business next week. The expansion will create the equivalent of 236 full-time jobs over the next two years, 40 of which are already in place. This is the third investment by Abbey National in Belfast since it established a pilot telesales operation there in 1995, employing 26 people.
A year later, the operation expanded, leading to the recruitment of another 38 employees.
In 1997, the bank announced two further projects, a separate teleservice centre employing 336 people to handle customer inquiries and a software development operation with 100 staff, most of them graduates.
The bank's investment in the city is now £8.4 million sterling (€12.7 million).
By the year 2001, it expects to employ 700 people in telesales, teleservices and software development.
The managing director of Abbey National's retail division, Mr Andrew Pople, said the company had chosen Belfast because of "its excellent supply of well-educated people with a very positive attitude to work and a friendly approach, both of which are essential for telephone sales and service".
The existing teleservice centre will now deal with telephone callers looking for information about the bank's savings and other products referred to it by staff in more than 800 branches across Britain and Northern Ireland. The newly-created sales call centre - employing 236 staff - will complement the bank's existing branch operations by handling customer calls from throughout the UK, providing information and financial advice across the full range of Abbey National products.
The latest investment, which amounts to £2.9 million sterling, is backed by a grant of £1.4 million from the North's Industrial Development Board, whose chairman, Dr Alan Gillespie, said it was "an extremely significant strategic development for Northern Ireland's fast-growing financial services sector".
Abbey National has operated in Northern Ireland for 30 years, and has 20 branches and other processing centres in 18 towns and cities.
