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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowStudent loan giant Sallie Mae is spending $12 million to expand its collections and call-center operations in Indianapolis, creating as many as 350 jobs over the next three years, the company confirmed Monday morning.
The company reached an agreement with the Indiana Economic Development Corp. to receive $3.9 million in tax credits if it can reach those hiring goals, according to public documents from the IEDC. The contract was signed Nov. 30.
The expansion is the second for the Newark, Delaware-based company in Indianapolis in less than two years. In June 2016, Sallie Mae announced plans to spend $15.7 million to open an office at 8425 Woodfield Crossing in northeast Indianapolis and add 278 workers to its staff of 131. Those positions were expected to pay about $55,000 annually on average.
For that expansion, the company inked a deal with the state to receive almost $2.4 million in tax credits and up to $100,000 in training grants if it fulfilled its contract by the end of 2018.
The company appears to be ahead of that pace. The new contract calls for Sallie Mae to add 350 workers to an existing workforce of 409 by the end of 2020, bringing total employment to 759.
The IEDC confirmed the latest incentives agreement and referred additional questions about the project to Sallie Mae.
Sallie Mae spokesman Rick Castellano said the $12 million will go toward infrastructure and expansion of the currently facility.
“We’re proud to continue to invest in Indiana and the local workforce," he said Monday in an email to IBJ. "We’ve invested millions of dollars in information technology and service as we build a first-rate customer experience, and the talent pool in Indianapolis is an asset to our growing business.”
To accommodate last year’s project, Sallie Mae relocated operations from 8320 Craig Street to a three-floor, 76,000-square-foot space in the Three Woodfield Crossing building, near Keystone at the Crossing. The new space included 550 workstations, five conference rooms, two training rooms, a multipurpose room and breakroom.
The office was designed to accommodate information technology and customer-service departments. In 2015, the company began moving all of its customer-service operations for private education loans from overseas to the United States.
Sallie Mae makes and services private education loans and offers banking products through Sallie Mae Bank.
At the end of third quarter, the company reported its private-education loan portfolio had grown 24 percent over the past year, to $17 billion.
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