GLOBAL financial services firm Thompson Reuters yesterday opened a 500-seat customer support center in Taguig City.

The English language support site commenced soft operations on May 25 and was put up to complement its non-English support centers in Geneva and Sydney.

“Currently, we have 80 professionals dealing in data applications that concerns financial markets and securities and technical support, which, on the other hand, handles technical and architectural applications of our products,” said Jason Hair, head of customer support in Asia.

We can’t give exact figures on how many more we’re going to hire, but definitely “several hundreds of people,” said Thomas Frossell, global head of customer service for markets.

Julia Warren, global head of human resources services, pointed out that “there is plentiful supply of candidates here for customer service.”

For his part, Raoul Teh, country manager of Thomson (Philippines) Corp., said: “We’re into partnership among local colleges and universities like De La Salle, University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and soon more schools to easily find our target recruits.”