By Brice Wallace
A financial technology company has chosen Cottonwood Heights for an operations center that is expected to create 1,449 jobs over the next nine years.
BlueVine Capital Inc., based in California, announced the $20 million project after being approved for a $4 million tax credit incentive by the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board at its December meeting.{mprestriction ids="1,3"}
“We’re very excited to join the thriving fintech community in Utah’s Silicon Slopes and look forward to welcoming local customer support and account management talent to our new operations center,” Eyal Lifshitz, CEO and co-founder of BlueVine, said in a prepared statement. “Our Utah operations center will help support and scale our vision for BlueVine business banking and help take our customer service to the next level.”
BlueVine offers a suite of products designed to meet the diverse financial needs of business owners, including business checking, lines of credit, term loans and invoice factoring. BlueVine has provided more than $2.5 billion in financing to small and medium-sized businesses since its founding in 2013. It offers business owners access to between $5,000 and $5 million in working capital.
The new jobs in Utah are expected to pay an average of $64,000. Total new wages over nine years are projected to be $422.6 million, with new state tax revenue generated by the project expected to be at nearly $16.4 million during that time.
“We’re extremely excited about where this fits in with our fintech industry,” Tom Wadsworth, GOED associate managing director, told the GOED board, noting the high number of jobs and high wages.
BlueVine has about 360 employees at its headquarters in Redwood City, California; offices in Gretna, Louisiana, and Jersey City, New Jersey; and an engineering center in Tel Aviv. The company has no operations in Utah, “but we’re eager to get started,” Brad Brodigan, chief commercial officer, told the board.
“The founder and I share a belief that small businesses are really underserved by the current financial service institutions, and we think there’s a really powerful opportunity to use technology to provide better financial services for small businesses, allowing them to move and manage their money in ways that are faster, more efficient and, more importantly, less expensive than through traditional methods,” Brodigan said.
The Cottonwood Heights project will be the company’s operations center, “where most of our job growth will happen over the next 10 years-plus,” he said.
“I’m very pleased that Utah is uniquely positioned to provide the right type of high-quality talent, with the unique expertise in both technology and financial services that we think is a really strong fit for us,” he said.
Mike Johnson, community and economic development director for Cottonwood Heights, said the project was part of “a good day for Cottonwood Heights.” Earlier in the GOED board meeting, the board approved an incentive for Breeze Aviation, which will put its headquarters in the city and create 369 jobs over five years.
“Again, [it’s] another business that fits very well into our target businesses that we as a city support and reach out to,” Johnson said. “We’re excited to do what we can to help BlueVine get up to speed quick and support their aggressive growth plan in Cottonwood Heights.”
“Our fintech sector continues to grow, and we’re pleased BlueVine has chosen to expand in the state,” Val Hale, GOED’s executive director, said in a prepared statement. “This project to build a new operations center for BlueVine will create many high-paying jobs that will be economically impactful for Utah.”
“In April 2018, we met with BlueVine during a Bay Area Global Strategy & Outreach (GS&O) campaign focused on fast-growing fintech companies,” Theresa A. Foxley, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, said in a prepared statement. “Welcoming BlueVine to Utah validates the strength of our fintech cluster and the effectiveness of our GS&O initiative.”{/mprestriction}
