On Tuesday, Charlotte, N.C.-based Truist Financial Corporation disclosed it was exiting the near-prime auto loan business after reaching a deal to sell its $5.5 billion loan portfolio.
That business decision also reverberated in North Texas: The same day, Truist’s auto loan subsidiary, Regional Acceptance Corporation, informed the Texas Workforce Commission it’s closing its office in southeast Arlington and laying off 205 full-time employees.
“As part of Truist’s previously announced agreement to sell substantially all assets of Regional Acceptance Corporation (RAC), teammates at the RAC location at 1351 East Bardin Road in Arlington, Texas, are affected,” Brian Davis, a Truist representative, wrote in an email to The Dallas Morning News. “We’re committed to supporting them through this transition including consideration for other roles at Truist, severance benefits, and job search assistance.”
RAC, a company that’s based in Greenville, N.C., and has a presence around the country, including a business center in Plano, will end its operations at the Arlington site when the loan deal is finalized, according to the company’s WARN letter. It was unclear how many RAC employees around the country received layoff notices.
The Arlington employees, who are not unionized, are expected to begin losing their jobs in late November, and all employees are expected to be out by the end of February.
Truist’s business pivot was in part the work of its new CEO, Michael Lyons, who took over the reins of the bank Sept. 1 after most recently leading the global fintech company Fiserv.
“Mike will move Truist forward with purpose and care, and a sense of urgency to realize our potential,” Bill Rogers, Truist’s outgoing CEO and new executive chair, said of Lyons in June.
That urgency included dropping a sector of the bank’s business that had lately been breaking even in order to tighten the company’s focus and improve its credit risk profile. “I think in the … simplest form, it’s going to be focusing on fewer things that frankly leverage our strengths,” Michael Maguire, Truist’s chief financial officer, said in a conversation Tuesday at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference.
The buyer of Truist’s $5.5 billion near-prime loan portfolio, which applied to borrowers with midtier credit profiles, is Apollo Global Management, Bloomberg reported.
The Arlington layoffs come days after three North Texas companies filed notices that included more than 1,500 pending job losses. The most came from Conifer Health Solutions, a D-FW-based subsidiary of Tenet Healthcare Corp. that announced it was laying off more than 1,000 employees, including remote workers, who report to its Dallas headquarters. CommonSpirt Health, a Chicago-based Catholic healthcare nonprofit, and the Texas Family Initiative, a Dallas-based nonprofit that provides foster care services, also announced major layoffs.