Financial technology giant NCR opened the first of two towers in its new headquarters campus in Midtown Atlanta on Monday.
NCR’s move from Duluth to Atlanta has been among the more high-profile corporate relocations within the region, as the company spurned the suburbs to locate near transit and Georgia Tech, in the heart of Midtown’s growing technology hub.
NCR said it will ultimately house 5,000 workers at the campus at Spring and 8th streets near Technology Square. The second tower will open later in the year.
In January 2015, after months of secret talks with state economic development officials, city leaders and Tech, NCR announced plans to move its headquarters from Gwinnett County to Midtown. It ranks as one of the largest corporate relocations within the metro Atlanta area in recent memory.
The company had mulled job cuts in Georgia before making known its plans for relocating to Midtown, the AJC reported in in February 2015. NCR later announced it would add the second tower, 1,800 new jobs and a new innovation lab.
NCR received incentive packages that could total more than $60 million as part of the move to Atlanta, including property tax breaks, tax credits for newly created jobs and grants.
“This campus symbolizes the power of reinvention,” NCR Chairman and CEO Bill Nuti said in a news release. “It celebrates the innovators, dreamers and problem-solvers who walk through our doors every day and have the courage to build a better tomorrow.”
NCR is in the midst of its own reinvention, from a company that focuses on hardware, such as cash registers and automated tellers, to software and the internet-of-things or IoT, which is when machines communicate with one another.
Under Nuti — who leads the company from New York — NCR has worked to transform itself into an “omni-channel leader,” helping merchants reach customers seamlessly in store, online and through mobile devices.
In 2015, company officials said they viewed the new campus as a calling card to help recruit top talent. The glass-wrapped campus will allow students at Georgia Tech to watch NCR technologists at work from the street.
Founded in 1884 as National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio, NCR moved to Gwinnett County in 2009, lured by about $109 million in state and local incentives. Georgia’s financial technology sector employs more than 40,000 people, according to the American Transaction Processors Coalition.
NCR announced plans in 2015 by financial giant Blackstone to invest $820 million in NCR as part of the Fortune 500 companies' broader move to software and services.
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