Ventajas
Great benefits and excellent work environment. (Laid Back Style). I have been in finance Industry over 35 years. Never seems such a great place. (To best describe I will say LA work style in NYC/NJ) Lots of time/opportunities for full time employees to learn and grow in the field if they are correctly connect with needed political string. Great culture and very nice people around. Work and life balance. Perfect place for interns and young college graduates to learn and be ready to enter into financial world without stress and knowing too much about IT. Perfect place for the people who want to be in finance industry but don't what to deal with high pressure rewarding positions. A perfect place for job security you can retire from one place with minimum skill set. For full time employees almost impossible to get fired unless you bring down the whole bank.
Desventajas
Nepotism at its finest. Minimum accountability/minimum effort base reward Not much room for (talent, performance based) promotions or growth . Not a good place for talented carrier oriented high paced professional who are in the middle of their carrier or want to grow and move up fast based on efforts. The only and unfortunate criteria to move up is to be friends with middle level management or have a long term working relation with the manager/departmental head. Low/Middle level management puts in bare minimum efforts to promote/select or retain the right talent. Most of the long term FTEs (Full Time Employees) are assigned and holding Leads/ SME /Project Manager roles based on the personal relationship with the managers. FTEs have all the time in the world to experiment/explore/learn the product. 90% of the technical work /advance system support is done by consultants/SOWs/vendors. Due to laid back work style /ethics. Most of the official SMEs/Team Leads/PMs are outdated on knowledge skill sets/ Industry standards. Some of them do even not posses basic knowledge of the product/system/project they are leading. Some of them are in initial phase of technology discovery. Any great idea/best practice/efficient solution must be suggested/discovered/invented by the officially assigned Project/Team otherwise it wont be even considered. Implementing any industry standards/intelligent optimization/scale-able solution is almost impossible. Consultant/Vendors has to carefully educate/convince the official SME without touching the ego so the official Project /Team lead can suggested/discovered/design or invest that idea. Otherwise it will not be even considered. Due to excellent relationship with vendors and army of consultants the system stable. Since most Officially assigned (Project/Team leads/SMEs) don't have appropriate knowledge/experience or the desire to lean newly implemented technology (consultants/SOWs and contractors) are not under any check or QA process. Many hired SOW/Expert learn/wing the product fist time onsite with excellent reviews and comments. Due to great laid back style Full Time employees and Immediate management do NOT care about anything . No one wants to address 800 pound gorilla in the room unless you are looking for trouble and not to have contract renewed.