Credit Suisse plans to ramp up hiring

Investment banking giant Credit Suisse expects to add in the neighborhood of 300 new employees next year now that its hunt for additional office space has ended.

This week Credit Suisse, which announced in the spring that it was seeking suitable office space to accommodate its expansion plans, signed an agreement to sublease 70,000 square feet of space in Morrisville from electronic device maker Lenovo.

Credit Suisse, which currently has about 1,670 workers at its Research Triangle Park site, calculates its new space can handle 550 workers – exceeding its target of finding enough space to accommodate 400 new hires. But Jim Captain, site executive for the Swiss company, isn’t worried about the extra space.

“I think we’re going to need all the space we’re taking,” Captain said. “As we look into the future, we remain optimistic about our growth in this area.”

Although Credit Suisse has added about 70 employees since May, it has scaled back its recruitment efforts because its 205,000-square-foot building in RTP is at full capacity, Captain said.

He said the company likely will ramp up its recruiting before the end of the year in anticipation of moving into its new space in January.

The company will be hiring “across the board” – including technology, finance, credit risk and research positions.

“We needed the expansion space because every one of our divisions is looking to increase its footprint,” he said.

About 400 employees from the company’s finance group and its investment banking support group will move into the Morrisville building, which is about a 10-minute drive from the company’s RTP site.

Credit Suisse is moving into what Lenovo calls “Building 3,” the smallest of the three buildings on the company’s Morrisville campus.

“Since the acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business and the opening of our second campus on Davis Drive, we have been consolidating space between our two campuses,” Lenovo spokesman Ray Gorman wrote in an email.

Lenovo expanded into two buildings on Davis Drive in RTP a year ago in conjunction with its $2.1 billion deal with IBM. Since then it has had two rounds of layoffs locally – cutting 230 jobs in August and 165 in May – as part of broader cost-cutting efforts.

Credit Suisse, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in the Triangle earlier this year, was the first major financial services firm based elsewhere to establish a major presence locally. Others that followed include Fidelity Investments, Deutsche Bank and MetLife.

Captain said that finding suitable space near Credit Suisse’s RTP site wasn’t easy.

“There is not a lot of readily available Class A office space in the area, certainly not for the size of footprint we were looking for,” he said.

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Credit Suisse plans to ramp up hiring."