TSYS to create 145 jobs in Columbus, Ohio

Credit-card and electronic payment processor TSYS, headquartered here in Columbus, is laying the groundwork to open a card-production facility in the Ohio state capital of Columbus.

“The primary function of it is it’s going to establish an in-house disaster recovery facility for our card-production business” in Columbus, Ga., TSYS spokesman Cyle Mims said Monday evening. “It will also allow for future growth opportunities in that business.”

(1 billion and counting: TSYS marks card production milestone)

Mims said the company isn’t prepared to make an official announcement yet, with terms of the lease and other contract details of the future Ohio facility still in the works.

TSYS already operates a 256,000-square-foot card- and statement-production facility off Moon Road in north Columbus, employing about 450 people at last count. That site also includes another 85,000-square-foot structure on 40 acres.

“We don’t anticipate any impact to the production team here or the facility here in Columbus,” Mims said.

The local card-production facility, which opened in 1993, topped 1 billion pieces mailed in its history in 2015. It mailed nearly 187 million pieces in 2014 alone, including new plastic cards, billing statements and card offers. That equated to more than 15.5 million pieces each month, making the facility one of the highest-volume mail operations in the Southeast. It even has its own U.S. Postal Service substation.

Mims declined to disclose how large the production facility will be in Columbus, Ohio, and how many people it might employ. However, the office of Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Monday announced a list of 10 economic projects approved for tax credits by the Ohio Tax Credit Authority. TSYS was among them.

The governor’s office said Total System Services Inc. is incorporated there as Georgia TSS Inc. It said the company expects to create 145 full-time jobs with an annual payroll of $5.6 million. The company was approved for a 1.327 percent Job Creation Tax Credit over seven years.

Citing a project fact sheet from the Columbus Department of Development, American City Business Journals in Ohio reported that TSYS will spend $24.5 million to improve and outfit a 200,000-square-foot building at the property site there. The job creation would take place over three years, with the facility having the capacity to produce 67 million credit cards, presumably annually. Columbus City Council in Ohio is considering a second incentive valued at just over $189,000, the business journal reported, on top of the state’s incentives valued at about $500,000 over seven years.

The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio also reported Monday that TSYS will be occupying space that was home to credit-card issuer Citigroup before it announced in 2015 that it was laying off 403 employees there.

TSYS, a global processor, has offices across the U.S. and around the world. It was in 2014 that the company confirmed it was opening a 62,000-square-foot customer service center in the Henry County city of McDonough, Ga., just southeast of Atlanta, employing up to 450 people.

Mims at the time said the firm considered opening a second call center in Columbus, but wanted to locate the new one away from the city as part of a disaster preparedness plan. Should a storm or other major disruptive event impact one center, the customer service activity will roll over to the second facility.

(TSYS hiring for new 450-employee call center in McDonough)

He said Monday the Ohio venture is essentially the same approach, with it also serving possible future growth for the company’s card-production needs. He said TSYS has been working several months on the Ohio facility, presumably negotiating with that state and property owners at the chosen site.

“We were looking for somewhere as a disaster recovery place, somewhere away from our current facility so if something happened here in this (Columbus, Ga.) area, we would have a back-up site, a disaster recovery site,” Mims said.

TSYS is a publicly traded company with its shares changing hands on the New York Stock Exchange.

This story was originally published February 27, 2017 at 8:14 PM with the headline "TSYS to create 145 jobs in Columbus, Ohio."