A year after it broke ground, construction on the new Old Port headquarters of payment services company Wex is 75 percent complete.
The company, which broke ground on Oct. 17, 2017, on the four-story office and parking complex, employs about 1,000 people at its South Portland facility. Roughly 40 percent of the employees there will relocate to the new building when it’s finished. Rob Gould, Wex spokesman, said furniture is expected to be installed in the new headquarters next month.
“Our employees should begin to occupy the building in February/March 2019,” he said.
The project’s site plan calls for a 100,000-square-foot, four-story mixed-use building that will provide office space for Wex with additional retail space underneath. Between 450 and 550 new parking spaces would be within 750 feet of the Thames Street site to accommodate the company’s needs and increased demand for public parking in Portland’s East End.
At a Press Herald business forum held last week, local real estate brokers gave a shout-out to the company for its plan to shuttle employees between the new headquarters and its South Portland facilities to reduce traffic congestion.
Wex is a fast-growing company that provides payment-processing services for vehicle fleets, online travel services and health care and employee benefits providers. On Monday, it announced it was buying Noventis, an electronics payment network based in Houston. The acquisition is expected to expand Wex’s reach as a corporate payments supplier and provide more channels to billing aggregators and financial institutions.
In its second-quarter earnings report, Wex saw a 22 percent increase in revenue over 2017, and announced plans to hire another 175 people.
CEO Melissa Smith said the bulk of the $1.2 billion company’s growth that quarter came from sales increases in its travel and corporate services and fleet services divisions. The travel and corporate payments business increased by 38 percent from a year earlier, while the fleet payments business was up by 21 percent, she said. Sales growth overseas was particularly strong in Europe, Asia and Brazil, Smith said.
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