A huge 1,500 jobs boost for Belfast came a step closer yesterday when construction work started on a £45 million call centre.
The Halifax bank is building the centre - the biggest in Europe - on the site of the city's old gasworks on the banks of the River Lagan. It will be housed in a 150,000 sq ft modern office development.
The call centre is to open next year, but recruitment will begin next week, with 200 jobs in place by the end of the year. Up to 1,500 jobs will have been created within four years, Halifax said.
The bank said the centre was central to its strategy of becoming the leading player in new banking channels, especially Internet and telephone banking.
It said the development would sit alongside Halifax's investment in a stand-alone Internet bank based in Edinburgh, which will employ up to 1,200 people.
At the ground-breaking ceremony Mr Andy Hornby, chief executive of Halifax Retail, said: "Our new banking business is growing rapidly and Belfast forms a core part of this process.
"The quality labour force and development infrastructure in Northern Ireland is a proposition that is simply too tempting to resist."
Mr Jim Rodgers, chairman of Belfast City Council's development committee, said the scale of the project had helped to consolidate the council's overall plans for the area at the bottom of the Ormeau Road.
"We are pleased that the Halifax will be working with us on the council's local employment initiative," he said.
"The aims of the initiative are to provide training and personal development support for local long-term unemployed people, so that local communities have the opportunity to benefit from local regeneration," he said.
Mr Brian Henning, the chief executive of CUSP, which is developing the complex for Halifax, said the movement to new office accommodation would send the prices of inner-city four-bedroom terraced housing "sky high".
Residential houses converted into offices in the 1970s and 1980s would be on sale for £500,000 within three years as they returned to their original function, he predicted.