One of York's biggest employers of the future opened for business today.

Customer services director Stephen West with staff members celebrating the start of business today. Picture: Frank Dwyer

Screen test: Customer service employees begin work at the new call centre in York. Picture: Frank Dwyer

CPP, a credit card insurance company, expects to be employing more than 1,000 people at its operations centre in Holgate Park within five years.

Its arrival opens another chapter in the chequered history of the former carriageworks site, where Thrall Europa have already established a freight wagon building factory.

At 9am today, the first dozen staff at the call centre started receiving calls from stranded travellers all over the world who have lost or been robbed of their plastic cards.

People who have taken out insurance with CPP will find their worries eased, as the staff get their cards electronically stopped across the globe within seconds. The staff can also send travellers emergency cash payments and sort out problems caused by lost or stolen passports or air tickets.

The call centre will also receive calls from people wanting to take out insurance, or adjust their existing cover.

Recruits Colin Dunning, from Pickering, Rita Jones, from Bishopthorpe, and Sonya Coulter, from Clifton, all said they had applied for work with CPP after reading in the Evening Press that the company was coming to York.

Rita, who praised the "fantastic" training she had received from CPP, said: "This company's arrival is good news for York. It's wonderful."

CPP has been based until now in Chelsea, London, but its cramped HQ was not big enough for the expanding business. The firm decided to open a new operations centre on the former carriageworks site after looking at numerous possible locations. The York Inward investment Board played a major role in securing the work for York.

Staff are located in a former carriageworks building until new offices can be built elsewhere on the site.

'Electronic cloud' rings in changes

The phones started ringing today at the new Card Protection Plan centre in York. Ron Godfrey paid a call

Welcome to York's virtual world - the ethereal place that the tecchies call the "electronic cloud".

There's nothing abstract about the jobs and money being generated on the Holgate Park site by CPP, an electronic concept made flesh.

Computers and telephones at the new call centre of CPP, or Card Protection Plan, today officially bleeped into action at the start of a planned £10 million investment over the next five years.

Given planning consent for building a further 60,000 sq ft at Holgate Park, the project should yield in that time the equivalent of 750 full-time jobs in the city shared between more than 1,000 people.

Meanwhile, the base for a link-up in the ether with CPP head office in the Kings Road, Chelsea, and plastic card holders throughout the entire planet is a very real, but for-the-moment-only sparsely populated, former Adtranz industrial building.

With its angular struts and girders, it is on a tract of once rundown track-side land now blooming with the arrival last year of US carriagemakers Thrall .

From this vast room, guided by clocks set to Greenwich Mean, European Standard, Hong Kong and New York times, and powered by millions of pounds worth of computer and telecommunications equipment, a massively-growing customer services team will recruit callers to their £10-fee card insurance scheme, sweetly balm the furrowed brows of complainants and instantly solve problems and dramas faced by card-losers from the Costa Brava to Karachi.

The expansion to York was achieved with the help of the York Inward Investment Board as well as the City of York Council, English Partnerships, York and North Yorkshire TEC, Lowfield School, York (which offered temporary room for training) and York College of Further and Higher Education.

And the Evening Press had its part to play in calling for people to record their interest in the prospect.

If the seraphic expressions of the first group of a dozen qualified trainees - mostly women - is anything to go by on this, their first official day "on-line", then the electronic cloud should be identified as cloud nine.

After all, they are pioneers of the next big stage in the success of a company which for ten years since it was established in 1980 by chairman-owner Hamish Ogston, suffered successive annual losses before taking off. Last year the group's pre-tax profit for the financial year to August 31 exceeded £4.4 million on a turnover of £30.6 million, shooting it into the listing for top 100 fastest-growing private companies.

Leading the way is Stephen West, 43, head-hunted as customer service director from a similar role with Equifax, the European credit reference agency. He not only pioneers the new opportunity at York but today also becomes the first occupant of Riverside House, the new Ouse-side luxury apartments. "It's a big day", he said.

see COMMENT 'A credit to York'

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