Pros
There are great opportunities for personal and professional development. It's a good company to work for irrespective of experience. When teams pull together there's a real feeling of achievement and most of the time teams work really well together. Internal moves (both sideways and upwards) are a regular occurrence giving people a good range of exposure, the development opportunities are strong and the company works hard to provide good benefits/training. People are friendly and outgoing, there's not too much of a focus on having the right degree over the right personal attributes. Some departments offer high level of flexible working which is really important. For the most part people are hard workers, friendly and engaging and
Cons
The risk awareness culture leads to impasse, because no team wants to stand up and fix something for fear that they'll be hit with a claim, there can be a "tag, you're it" mentality with risk. Getting things done at a management level can be mind-numbing. Some poor performers and bad attitudes are not regularly dealt with which prevents simple tasks from being actioned - and sometimes management doesn't have the capacity to handle poor performance because the teams are overloaded and they're having to pitch in with day to day tasks. There can be an attitude of us vs them across departments, which breeds inaction. The technology can be painstakingly slow, and the companies tools for accurately measuring workload are non-existent. There's no central IT support system for new technology requirements (macros etc) meaning that departments either have no means of electronically pulling data leading to a huge manual effort, or hire people with excel skills to write codes on top of their day to day. Staff in certain departments are under-utilised, meaning they don't have enough work to do day in day out, whereas other departments are over-loaded and struggling to maintain a 40 hour week resulting in high levels of overtime. Client facing staff can sometimes forget which company they work for because they're so eager to give the client whatever they want, irrespective of the risk to the bank. Back office can struggle to comprehend the importance of resolving issues to keep clients happy.