KeyBank Reviews

I worked for Key as a branch manager for about four years. Quite frankly, it is a very disorganized, poorly run company. Although I may sound like a disgruntled employee, that’s really not the case. I worked for some good people along the way and it wasn’t always this way. I left because of excessive micromanagement and extremely poor staffing, along with several other issues I’ll outline below. First and foremost, Key Bank is the least original bank out there. Whatever Bank of America, Chase or Citi are doing, Key will do it six months later. It literally is a race to the bottom when it comes to who can do more with less. All national and regional banks are cutting staff and trying to have the best efficiency ratios. If you are managing a branch, this means less employees every year. That makes it much more difficult to generate sales and to provide decent customer service. Key’s solution (like their competitors) is to push people to online or mobile channels. If the customers don’t like the line at the branch, they will use the ATM, their phone or online banking. It might save some expenses but eliminates many sales opportunities. It also has a negative impact on older clients, but Key doesn’t seem to care. Second, staffing is not a concern. It may take several months to fill a position. There is no sense of urgency from anyone. It almost seems like a policy to leave positions open to save money. Teller positions are not valued by upper management at all. They doubled teller referral goals this year and have fire many long-term tellers because of it. Most of the tellers that are hitting their goals aren’t doing so ethically, but those are the people getting all the recognition. Why someone in upper management doesn’t question how someone is doubling or tripling their production overnight is beyond me. As a company that is always cutting costs, they pay a lot out in incentives to people doing things the wrong way. Third, if you manage a branch for Key, expect EXCESSIVE micromanagement. It wasn’t always that way but is now the culture. You will get excessive emails, have to do excessive amounts of tracking of your daily activities and have excessive conference calls. Expect that to take up a minimum of ten to fifteen hours of your week if not more. That is not an exaggeration. You can have a great month and be doing well year to date, but have a bad week or two and you will be called out on it. Fourth, computer systems are horrible, slow and very dated. Expect them to be down a lot. Some systems don’t interface well with others. They have an old DOS based system they won’t train anyone on because they tell you it is going away. Except they’ve been saying that for ten years. There are literally so many systems and everything is so disorganized that they have to have a special employee helpdesk to help you find answers and procedures. And forget it if you want to call a department directly. You have to call the helpdesk first and if they can’t answer your question, then they MIGHT put you through to the department responsible. If you have to call for help, expect to be on the phone up to a half an hour or more. Fifth, outsourcing is rampant. Some of the few internal departments you can call directly (like accounts payable) are now in India. Their English is broken at best and you will usually have to have them email you because you won’t understand them. This is not be insulting to them. It’s just a fact. They also outsourced a great deal of customer service and online banking support. I would get numerous complaints weekly from customers because of this. Key is a Cleveland based bank. Their outsourcing has created an environment of fear at the corporate offices and frustration for their customers. It hardly seems worth it. Sixth, if you work in a branch and want advancement or to move to the corporate offices, forget it. Regardless of your performance or education, they will consider other corporate employees or outside candidates long before anyone that works at a branch. They also won’t ever communicate with you to tell you if you got the job or not. In most cases, you’ll never get an interview. It goes back to the staffing piece. They aren’t in a hurry to fill positions and if they can figure out a way to outsource it, they will. Last, training is horrible. If you don’t heed my previous warnings and get a job with Key, expect to have to figure out your job yourself. It is pretty much trial by fire. For some people that is okay. I obviously made it through but I watched a lot of people get frustrated and quit. That is because you are expected to start producing after the first couple months and if you don’t know procedures, where to find information or have to constantly call a helpdesk, you will likely start out underperforming. As a manager, it is very frustrating to lose people because of something like training when it takes so long to hire someone in the first place. If you have to start over, it may take another couple months to find someone else. There really needs to be better organization and communication for new employees. With constant reductions in branch staffing, that needs to come from a centralized training coordinator or someone responsible for it in each region.

- Engineering culture is virtually non-existent. Keybank is still very much a waterfall company that has contractors do most of the software development work. In house engineers have the same level of trust and responsibilities as contractors, which means you have no influence on product and software architecture decisions. Prepare to turn off your creative brain and just develop whatever your told. - Engineering teams are siloed from each other that there is no shared accountability for delivering great products. As long as your team does their small part of the puzzle, your team is in the clear even though the overall software product you are working on is in shambles. - Employee moral is abysmal, which leads to a toxic work environment. 3/4 of the HelloWallet employees who came over from the Keybank acquisition have left. Common employee issues were raised to upper level management and HR and they just turned a blind eye. Instead of trying to boost suffering moral, upper level management just takes away office amenities that further degrades moral. - Upper level management has made countless questionable product decisions. A large product initiative was mandated from upper level management, but our day to day work doesn’t work towards that initiative at all. KPIs also don’t reflect the day to day work and upper level management doesn’t seem to realize that and scolds the team for not meeting them.