St. Louis to Be Hyundai Finance Company Site
Chasing a more convenient time zone and a pool of affordable workers, Hyundai Motor America has chosen St. Louis as the site for a $15-million national operating center for its new in-house finance company.
Dennis D. Lamont, chief operating officer of Hyundai Motor Finance Co., said that while he and his administration team will be at Hyundai Motor America headquarters on Talbert Avenue here, the credit and loan processing work will be located in St. Louis because the area provides the operation with a large pool of workers willing to take and keep lower-paid clerical jobs.
Orange County clerical workers are notorious for changing jobs frequently as they chase bigger paychecks, Lamont said.
Turnover rates are extremely high in the county, he said, because even an extra $50 a month can make a big difference to an office worker trying to cope with the area’s high cost of living.
George L. Lundgren, vice president of the Irvine office of TPF&C;, an international personnel consulting firm, said clients in Orange County increasingly are reporting difficulties in finding qualified office workers.
“There is no question that the labor pool of clerical and processing workers is diminishing in Orange County,” Lundgren said. “And with increasing housing costs and commuting times, there is much more demand than supply. That means that wages are being bid up and workers are changing jobs frequently.
“I’m not sure the situation is ‘notorious’ yet,” he said, “but it sure is getting there.”
By locating the operations center in St. Louis, Lamont said, Hyundai hopes to be assured of a stable work force. In most businesses, stability and longevity of workers mean higher production and fewer errors.
The St. Louis center will open with about 45 employees and that number will grow as business increases, Hyundai officials said.
The St. Louis operating center also will enable Hyundai Motor Finance to respond promptly to credit applications from car buyers in the East, Lamont said.
“A lot of cars are sold in the evening, and the dealers fax the financing applications at the end of the day” for action the following morning.
The California operation was inconvenient for Hyundai’s dealers in the East because of the three-hour time difference. Hyundai workers either had to start work at 5 a.m. or Eastern dealers would lose sales because the finance operation could not respond quickly to customers’ credit requests, he said. St. Louis is just one hour behind the Eastern time zone.
