Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., a publicly traded financial and business services company, has opened a new call center in North Richland Hills that will bring 200 new jobs to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. PRA plans to immediately hire 150 operations managers, account representatives and other professional positions, with an additional 50 employees by the end of 2014.
The company’s new 45,000-square-foot call center at 6341 Grapevine Highway in North Richland Hills will have capacity for more than 550 employees, and will play a key role in managing PRA’s continued growth. “This year alone, PRA acquired nearly 3 million new accounts direct from major bank sellers of defaulted debt,” said Neal Stern, executive vice president of operations for PRA. The company now manages more than 34 million accounts, largely defaulted credit card debt.
According to Stern, major banks are moving toward prohibiting “offshore collections” as a condition of selling their accounts to PRA. “Major banks are seeing growing value in companies that will manage these accounts with U.S.-based talent,” Stern said. “With the opening of the new call center, PRA is bringing all of its U.S. collections jobs back to the U.S.,” he said. The company closed its small offshore offices earlier this year. Headquartered in Norfolk, Va., PRA has more than 3,300 employees in the United States and the United Kingdom. Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc. trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol PRAA.