Sir Fred Goodwin, CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, signed the final steel beam to be installed at the bank”™s new Stamford building during a recent site visit. The $500 million project will create the largest environmentally-responsible building in Connecticut.
The building will be occupied by RBS America and its global banking and markets businesses, including RBS Greenwich Capital.
The complex is slated to hold a 95,000-square-foot trading floor, and 300,000 square feet of office space for 3,000 employees. RBS Greenwich Capital will move from Steamboat Road on the water’s edge in Greenwich; the corporate banking office will move from Manhattan.
The state is providing $100 million in tax breaks for the building as part of an incentive package. Also, the city has agreed to forego part of the property tax for the building”™s first five years.
“This project’s economic benefit is tremendous for the state of Connecticut,” said Gov. M. Jodi Rell in a prepared statement.
RBS has assured the city it will be bringing 1,150 new jobs to the state in addition to the 700 employees it is relocating from Greenwich. The move to Stamford will put RBS directly across the street from another of the world”™s financial firm titans, UBS. By international market capitalization standards RBS ranks eighth.
The trading floor has about a 1,000-person capacity and is roughly 100,000 square feet according to Roger Ferris, founding partner of Roger Ferris and Partners L.L.C. Architects. There are also about 400 peripheral positions located in other parts of the design.
“Were going to get a LEED rating, which is a naturally recognized benchmark,” said Roger Ferris of Roger Ferris and Partners. “We expect to get a gold rating. RBS you could think of as systemically concerned about the environment.” LEED stands for leadership in environmental and energy design.
Since the beginning of construction, 70,000 cubic yards of soil has been removed and 30,000 cubic yards of concrete has been brought in. In the finished product there will be 6 acres of glass on the building.
“One of the largest challenges was wrapping the trading floor around the parking garage,” said Ferris. “If you notice most parking garages dominate the I-95 side. We looked at 95 as a Main Street.
Instead of ignoring the view, we were able to learn the lessons and integrate the parking in a way that made it part of an architectural composition.”
“What it really means is that Stamford’s place in the financial industry in the world, as a capital of financial services, is now secure,” said Mayor Dannel Malloy.
Plenty of work remains.
“What”™s remarkable to me is how many of the contractors are Connecticut based,” said Ferris. “By the spring there will be 1,000 construction workers on site.”
