April 9, 2018

Fast-growing Meta Financial Group has added about 140 employees in the past year, with an additional 100 planned this year.

Most of those jobs are in Sioux Falls, prompting Meta, which is the parent company of MetaBank and Meta Payment Systems, to plan for more office space.

The big vision is a contiguous, campus-like complex of buildings at The Edges, home to Meta’s corporate office in southwest Sioux Falls.

Meta added space in a building next to its corporate office a couple of years ago when The Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society vacated it. That building is shared with Total Card, which is moving to Lake Lorraine later this year.

“We’ll redesign the Total Card space and the space we have now, which will create room for another 200 people,” chairman and CEO Tyler Haahr said. “We’re already full from the Good Samaritan space we took a couple years ago.”

In the meantime, Meta is leasing 5,000 square feet at the nearby former Globe University building for a few dozen employees.

“We took the space to spread out a bit,” Haahr said. Meta has a total of 550 employees in the three buildings and 100 more across the city.

There’s about 25,000 square feet still available in the vacant Globe building, which also can be expanded.

“We have several groups looking at the building at this time,” said Raquel Blount of Lloyd Cos., who has it listed. “It is a great opportunity to get the building branding and interstate exposure.  It is very accessible and a flexible building design.”

Meta’s eventual construction plan involves a new building that would connect the existing corporate headquarters and the building currently shared with Total Card.

“I don’t know when it will happen, but we’re in the early stages of discussion about what that building would look like,” Haahr said. “That would be the next step to create enough room for at least another couple hundred people.”