Pros
Should you desire a career experience where you become less intelligent, be surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, and get invited for 200 tea/coffee breaks a day by people who do not do any work, then this company is here for you.
Cons
1) Too many imbeciles, lazy bosses and clueless colleagues who are "Here for Good". Their only purpose is to milk the bank of its cash while not doing any work. All they do is (a) Talk at meetings without making sense, (b) try to steal your work and pass it off as their own (c) push emails around to 'coordinate' and seem like they are doing work. 2) Which company has so many 'Head of XXX' and big inflated titles? I think SC has up to 75 CFOs and 30 COOs. One COO will manage 15 COOs...who in turn manage other COOs. (there's CIB COO, CFO COO, FM COO, FM Finacne COO, GB COO, GB ASA COO....etc etc) and this repeats for all the C-Suite functions. When these psudo C-Suite and peduso-Heads go out to market, they are laughed at. COO Salary at 1/20th the salary of a normal COO elsewhere? Have a laugh. They might have a Toilet CFO, Pantry CEO, Head of Meeting Rooms, MBFC Gantry CFO, ATM CFO, Email CFO etc. The common joke when someone is heading to SC is: "oh, what department are you heading?" - even for a fresh graduate. 3) Many Senior Managers/ Middle Management are clueless about their role. They managed to secure their position by jumping internally to various other roles. Where clueless managers (who do not know what is needed) hire such clueless staff; who in turn also hire other clueless staff. The entire pyramid is rotten - nobody knows what is going on. Managers throw around big words like "Big Data" and "Machine Learning" and "Unsupervised Learning" while not know what they really are. Do simple balance sheet calculations seriously need big data and unsupervised learning? It's simple accounting! Worst thing is that their bosses are impressed, and themselves go about throwing these words around - as if it will solve the bank's problems. No amount of ML can help you if you do not even have proper data - its like trying to build a skyscraper using tissue paper. I daresay the entire chain relies on the poor fresh graduate at the bottom who tries to properly understand what the job is about. 4) Staff in Singapore from certain other countries are rude and demeaning to the auxiliary staff in office - such as the cleaners, concierge, building services. They place used cups in the pantry, especting the cleaner to wash it for them. They leave food around, expecting the cleaner to clean up after them. Worst of all, if you have ever had the misforunte of working at their Changi Business Park office, you'll realise that there are humans in need of toilet training like infant animals! They do their business anywhere but into the toilet bowl, and pee all over the place. It is so bad that the building services team has asked the cleaning uncle to clean up every hour! Every. Single. Hour. The poor cleaning uncle has a torrid time. 5) The bank's systems are archaic. Probably can't talk about it in specifity but you will realise you're better off with paper and pen. 6) Last but not least, there is no accountability. Ineptitude, sloth, slipshod work, and even malfeasance is tolerated throughout the bank. Managers who do not deliver projects after asking for millions of dollars of funding are still around; their projects conveniently forgotten and written off. What they do is to find a new role within the bank, and chuck the project off into some god-forsaken hole. Individuals seem to be graded on how many times they have coffee/tea with their managers instead of quality of work. If you've had the misfortune to grace the canteen in Changi Business Park during a work-week, you'll realise that it is constantly packed throughout the day with people having 'coffee chats' (which is really just a secret language for malingering). --honestly, no consultant, system, way of working can fix the disaster that is Standard Chartered. It might be an option to liquidate the bank and start from bottom up again.
