Pros
None. There are no pros to working at NEC. Corporate Culture is very poor. US Corporate and Operations Finance leadership are basically both incompetent and have no qualms throwing Senior Financial Analysts "under the bus" to avoid taking responsibility for their own leadership mistakes. Average shelf-life of a Senior Financial Analyst "team" member at the company right now appears to be about 6 - 9 months, on average. After that, person is fired and replaced with somebody else.
Cons
Leadership team of NEC is extremely "cliquish"; not terribly self-aware and would not be qualified to hold similar stature positions in other industries. Putting incompetent people in important jobs is a good recipe for accounting/earnings manipulation...which is essentially what the US management team does to "make the numbers" and meet UK parent company expectations. Corporate Finance team is especially poor, in my honest opinion. Being effective in Corporate Finance is about partnership and dialogue. It's very hard to "partner" with other parts of the company and do your job when the rest of the company thinks that you are "Ivory Tower" buffoons and doesn't really want to talk to you. If you have to constantly remind the operations people in your company that you were an "Investment Banker"... it's a pretty good indication that you are not very good at your job and don't have their respect. I am no longer an employee (thank God!); however the straw that broke the camel's back for me with NEC was: 3 months after I left the company, I heard company fired a Senior Financial Analyst who had only been working there for about 4 months and was still "clambering up the learning curve.". His wife was 3 months pregnant at the time. I called him up and confirmed it myself. That is a verifiable fact and is a whole new level of inhumanity that I have never come across in any company I've worked for. If you are looking for a good job to advance your career... look elsewhere. There's no increased professional stature to be had from: holding a poor job, in a dying industry, in a company with poor culture and where there is a high risk that you will be fired before you hit your 12 month anniversary. No one is going to look at your resume years from now and say: "You worked in Corporate Finance or Operations Finance for National Express Corporation. Impressive.".