Bloomberg — Visa Inc. (V) is opening a new office in Atlanta as the payments giant proceeds with plans to triple its workforce in the city even as rivals cut back on their staffing.
The company has almost doubled its presence in Atlanta in recent years, increasing employees in the Southeastern city to about 350. With the new office, Visa plans to boost its local workforce even further, to about 1,000, in coming years.
“We have really almost every function within Visa represented here, but the concentration is primarily technology,” Elizabeth Rector, Visa’s head of global client services, said in an interview. “That’ll be about 50% of the team here, and then client services will be about 30% of the team here, and the rest will vary.”
With the hires, Visa is bucking financial-technology trends. Competitors have been trimming their workforces in recent months as consumers’ spending growth slows and investors worry about the possibility of a coming recession. Plaid Inc., Stripe Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. have all announced job cuts in recent months.
The state of Georgia is home to more than 70 companies involved in payments and financial technology, according to the American Transaction Processors Coalition. About 70% of all US payments processed annually run through the state, the coalition has found.
Visa’s new Atlanta offices will help the firm achieve goals it set almost three years ago for improving the diversity of its ranks, Rector said. In 2020, the company said it would seek to increase the number of under-represented employees by 50% in five years.
“Atlanta has one of the most diverse technology workforces in the nation,” Rector said. More than half of the city’s population is Black or Latino, compared with about 20% for San Francisco, where Visa is based. “That provides us great access to diverse talent. Atlanta is key to our overall inclusion and diversity goals.”
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