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The future of retail finance — making it faster and more secure — is quietly being worked out in the Kettering Business Park.
Synchrony Financial, the largest company in the business park with 1,900 employees, has opened what it calls an “innovation station” — a place where new technology in arranging consumer financing is developed and tested.
No new immediate hiring is expected as a result of the station’s opening — 45 employees now work there — but the IT and research functions housed at the center will only strengthen the Kettering center’s overall importance to the company, said Glenn Marino, chief executive of the company’s payment solutions platform.
Kettering is Synchrony’s largest U.S. site. The site at 950 Forrer Blvd. has a major call center, but Kettering is also the headquarters of the company’s payment solutions business. Synchrony oversees “private label” credit cards and financing for some 300,000 merchant and retail businesses in some 400,000 locations.
That includes consumer financing for companies like H.H. Gregg, Walmart, Amazon and your local Morris Furniture and Tire Discounters dealers, among many others.
When a shopper buys, say, a TV at H.H. Gregg and finances that purchase with an H.H. Gregg credit card or six-months deferred interest, Synchrony is involved.
The company hopes to make those purchases smoother and more secure with new technology being created at the innovation station. Jay Neidermeyer, senior vice president and IT leader for Synchrony Payment Solutions and Commercial, on Wednesday demonstrated a technology being tested in Kettering — one that reads the hands of shoppers to identify them through “bio-metric” markers.
Neidermeyer resisted predicting precisely when such identification technology might be widely used. But he said the technology is viable now.
“We’re not too far from the day when pulling plastic out will be kind of quaint,” Neidermeyer said.
Technology also gives businesses a better look at the kinds of things for which consumers unlimber their wallets.
“Everybody has in their pockets a smart phone,” said Greg Simpson, Synchrony senior vice president and chief technology officer in IT. “The data that’s available out there today, with all the different sensors that are out there, gives us a much bigger picture of what people are doing, the types of things they’re purchasing.”
The innovation station involves other functions: marketing, a forensics lab, work against fraud and more.
Opening in Kettering makes sense, with the area’s universities and reasonable cost of loving, executives said.
“This is a place where we can do some unique things with the talent in the local area,” Marino said.
Earlier this year, Synchrony announced plans to bring 200 new jobs to its approximately 400,000-square-feet of offices at 950 Forrer Blvd.
“I know they’re in the process of that already,” said Gregg Gorsuch, development director for the city of Kettering.
Synchrony also is opening a career center for training of employees, Gorsuch added.
“Synchrony just continues to be a leader in their industry,” he said.
The company is a successor to the GE Capital operation that had been at the Kettering Business Park, a company that itself succeeded a Bank One operation there. In one form or another, a consumer financing operation has been housed at the park since about 1996, Gorsuch said.
“With that number of employees, they are the lifeblood of the business park,” he said.
Retail card revenue makes up 69 percent of Synchrony’s platform revenue. In 2015, the company saw net earnings rise 5 percent to $2.2 billion, while it financed $113.6 billion of purchase volume, up 10.1 percent from 2014.
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