Is the shift in focus to biotech jobs right for Tampa?

Call them back-office operations or "shared services centers," but please don't call them call centers, says Irv Cohen.

In the early and mid-2000s, Cohen - then an executive with a division of JPMorgan Chase - lobbied hard to bring the huge back-office operations of JPMorgan and other financial institutions to Tampa. Tens of thousands of people now work locally in the industry.

Some are low-paid customer service jobs, but Cohen insists that many of the jobs that arrived were sophisticated and dealt with processing billions of dollars of mortgages and stock trades.

But today, it appears the momentum behind the Bay area's financial services movement - once dubbed "Wall Street South" - has petered out. Reasons for that are hotly debated. Some wonder if banks and insurance companies touted their importance to the local economy in order win lucrative tax breaks. Once they won the tax breaks, they stopped trying to bring jobs to the area, the theory goes.

But Cohen believes it was economic development leaders who changed direction to try to chase after pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms.

The debate raises a tough question facing the Bay area: should it build on its existing strengths, or shoot for the moon and try to be a hub of biotech companies like Boston?

"I'm a very firm believer in the results speak for themselves," Cohen says of the financial services efforts.

The Bay area's financial sector got started as far back as 1964, when two companies - Raymond & Associates and Robert A. James Investments - merged to create Raymond James & Associates in St. Petersburg.

Little by little, similar companies began to dip their toes in Tampa Bay.

MetLife opened its first service center outside of New York in Tampa in 1969 and expanded throughout the 1970s. Following in later years were the company that eventually would become Franklin Templeton Investments, accounting firm Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers), Citigroup, Chase Manhattan (now JPMorgan Chase) and others.

By the early 2000s, people began to talk about the Bay area as "Wall Street South" while keeping a straight face.

All the expansions meant lots of jobs. Just before the banking crisis hit in 2008, the finance and insurance industries employed more than 78,000 people in the Bay area, although it has fallen with the recession, state statistics show. The industry offered fairly high wages in Florida, about $49,000, according to a 2004 report issued by proponents of the financial services cluster.

Cohen got involved in the local industry in 1999. President of JPMorgan Treasury Technologies, he led an effort that year to relocate the back-office operation from New York to Tampa. The Treasury Technologies division in Tampa grew to at least 1,600 employees by 2003.

Cohen joined the effort to bring other companies to the Bay area, figuring it would provide a deeper pool of talent for companies like JPMorgan and jobs for local residents. He helped launch a trade group called Financial Florida to represent the back-office operations of banks and insurance companies.

Heavy-hitters from his own bank, as well as Franklin Templeton, GunnAllen Financial and other institutions participated. One victory was getting the state to designate financial services as a "High Impact" industry, a designation that entitled banks and insurers to lucrative tax breaks for creating jobs.

Another victory was getting the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. in 2004, a company that processes securities trades worth $1.5 quadrillion per year, to create 500 jobs in New Tampa.

"Part of my agenda was to create jobs so that my kids don't have to relocate to Charlotte or New York," Cohen says now. "Think about the money that the state spends educating kids at the University of Florida. Can those kids find jobs?"

But even as Financial Florida was rolling along, people began to wonder if the Bay area was becoming a one-trick pony focused on banks and insurance companies. The industry also had trouble shaking its call-center image.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush and state leaders started eyeing biotechnology firms, hoping to lure scientists to the state to search for cures to cancer and other maladies. Their biggest win was luring a prestigious biotech firm, the Scripps Research Institute, to Palm Beach County.

In recent years, the Bay area scored two wins bringing prestigious institutes to the USF area: a scientific lab called M2Gen across the street from USF that is seeking new methods to treat cancer. M2Gen is a partnership between Moffitt Cancer Center and the drug company Merck. A second victory was luring the Draper Laboratory to the USF campus to research microscopic technologies.

Meanwhile University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft took over as chairman of the Committee of One Hundred, a group that tries to recruit businesses to come to Hillsborough County. Economic development leaders say Genshaft pushed to expand USF's role in economic development and luring biotech companies to the area.

"Life sciences is like the golden ring that every economic development agency wants to chase, and a few years ago Florida was not even in the running," says Larry Richey, a local real estate executive involved in economic development circles.

But to Cohen, all the excitement over scientific labs came at the expense of Wall Street South.

By 2005, the state's economic development agency, Enterprise Florida, and local agencies seemed less interested in building the financial services industry, he said. Government agencies weren't willing to spend money to market the industry, he added.

Meantime, Robin Ronne, a business recruiter with the local Committee of One Hundred, left that agency reportedly over personality clashes. Ronne had played a hand in luring banks and insurers to the area for years.

Eventually, Cohen grew frustrated and stopped working on the Wall Street South issue. Today, the Financial Florida trade group is largely dormant and its Web site, at www.financialflorida.com, shut down. In the last few years, a few companies have announced plans to expand in the area, including the USAA insurance giant, but the steady string of new banks and insurers moving to the area has largely subsided.

Cohen left JPMorgan Chase in 2005 and now splits his time between Tampa and New York. He doesn't hide his bitterness. Why focus so much energy on the dream of biotechnology when the area already has such a strength in banking and insurance, he asks.

As prestigious as M2Gen - the Moffitt-Merck lab - is, the institute only employs 154 people around Florida, including 87 in Hillsborough County.

All told, state and local governments have spent $1.5 billion on economic incentives to attract biotechnology clusters to Florida. A recent report by the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found that the investment has had relatively little payoff so far - just 36 biotech companies have sprung up in the six counties that got incentive money, only 19 of which have any employees or are paying wages.

Larry Novey, an analyst with the Florida agency, said it's too early to tell if Florida has made a good investment in biotechnology, and state leaders say it will take more time for the industry to develop.

"No one's opposed to biotech," Cohen says. "But those jobs are so much more in the future and the number of jobs are so much less (than in financial services)."

Still, many in economic development circles say the Bay area and state were right to turn some of their attention toward science and biotech.

In the past few years, Florida's banking industry has suffered from the recession, the crisis on Wall Street and the loss of jobs through automation and offshore outsourcing, a recent Enterprise Florida report noted. Meanwhile, Joe McCann, a former dean of the University of Tampa's business school, said it seemed as though some leaders of Financial Florida lost interest once the industry became eligible for tax incentives.

"When the High Impact (designation) thing came along, it just kind of fell apart," McCann said of the Financial Florida trade group.

Louis Laubscher, chief operating officer of Enterprise Florida, said banks are trying to get profitable recently, not expanding their operations. So, there haven't been as many companies to pursue. Florida has become a player in biotechnology, he said, but it hasn't been at the expense of financial services, he said.

"That didn't mean that mother liked you better than me," Laubscher said. "That's just not the truth."