20 July 2010
Visa Chief, Global Customer Services
The guest list looked like a Who’s Who of international business — from Avaya to Diageo, Odebrecht to Yamaha — when WorldCity hosted its fifth annual “Who’s Here” celebration May 13 in Miami.
The party honored South Florida’s multinational community, and Miami-Dade County’s economic development group brought good news to the crowd: Payments giant Visa is opening a global call center in Miami next month that will employ 350 people. Plus, county promoters are working with three major companies to try to relocate their worldwide headquarters to the Miami area.
“We’d be happy with one of them” choosing Miami as its global base, said Frank Nero, president of The Beacon Council development group, as executives buzzed over who the unnamed companies on the prowl might be.
The party celebrated South Florida’s strength in international business. At last count, the tri-county area hosted offices for more than 1,100 multinationals employing 125,000 people locally. Those include hundreds of regional and Latin American headquarters. They enjoy easy links at Miami International Airport, which offers more flights to Latin America than all U.S. airports combined, Nero said.
The Beacon Council has helped lure many of the regional headquarters in recent years, including Volkswagen, Porsche, Kraft Foods and Spain’s Telefonica. Now, the group is looking to attract not only regional offices but also ones with a global reach, drawing on Miami’s multi-lingual workforce.
Among its newest arrivals: Visa, which is investing nearly $4 million to open a global call center, employing staff who speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic and other languages. The office will be located in a six-floor building Visa already uses near Miami airport.
“Visa is proof that Miami is not only a hub for business with Latin America but throughout the globe,” Nero told celebrants from such companies as Discovery Networks, Microsoft, Hellman, LAN and Western Union.
Visa considered other locations for its new call center, but opted for Miami for several reasons: incentives, help from The Beacon Council, room at its existing building, but most of all, the availability of international talent with language skills far beyond English and Spanish, said a top global executive.
“The cost, availability and talent of labor was key. At a call center, 70 percent of cost is labor,” Jon Tholen, Visa’s chief of global customer service, said in a question-and-answer session with the audience.
Participants asked Tholen for advice on customer service, considering that Visa call centers handle about 25 million calls a year and the company processes about $4.8 trillion in transactions annually.
“Make sure your customer service experience is consistent,” Tholen suggested. “Listening and triage is paramount to success.”
Pat Roth, executive director of the Florida International Bankers Association, asked about trends to standardize credit cards worldwide. Today, the United States uses cards that you swipe and sign, but Europe instead uses cards that hold a computer chip and require a Personal Identification Number.
Tholen said cards “with chips and PINs” are popular in most countries. They offer superior protection against fraud. But “to switch over is really expensive for merchants in the U.S.” who would need new point-of-sale machines. Most U.S. stores now insist that costs to switch outweigh benefits, he said.
To help U.S. cardholders who travel abroad, some card issuers are looking at offering U.S. customers an additional chip-and-PIN card to use on trips overseas, Tholen added.
But how does Visa reach out to the millions of people worldwide who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards but still need ways to pay?, asked Tak Takasu, WorldCity’s director of community.
Tholen said Visa increasingly offers pre-paid and debit cards, which now are make up more than 70 percent of volume on its network. Social welfare and aid is now distributed on cards in countries like Haiti and Pakistan, so “pre-paid cards really become their bank account, their wallet,” he said.
WorldCity is completing its fifth annual study on “Who’s Here” in South Florida’s multinational community with title sponsors The Beacon Council, University of Miami School of Business Administration and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Florida. Enterprise Florida also provided support.
In addition to those three sponsors, sponsors for the May 13 celebration included Medtronic, Waterford at Blue Lagoon and Chevron.