Pros
Most of the people are great; I built great friendships with a lot of the people there. Work life balance was great; I was out the door by 5pm most days during my 3 years at Amex, which is unheard of in New York. Salary was good. Maybe I'm not greedy or maybe I wasn't very smart and didn't do my market comparison, but I was happy with my salary and the 15-20% bonus I got as a manager (sometimes more depending on business unit and self performance). I also liked the fact that there's an on-site wellness center and a very well promoted list of benefits (such as free therapy/counseling both on- and off-site, healthy living incentives, and more). There's a great opportunity for advancement (up until a certain point). Depending on which business unit you're in, you may end up getting very valuable international experience.
Kontras
I saw some of the most horrible, selfish leaders at Amex. Not to say that they're not great people, but it just seems that as people move up the corporate ladder, there's not an option to be a high-ranked individual contributor so you end up with a lot of high-performers who are terrible leaders, making team members miserable. There's no way to truly provide anonymous 360 feedback in a meaningful way for your leaders, so these terrible leaders rarely every grow or improve over time. There's also a very passive aggressive culture, especially within the New York office, and transparency is something everyone would talk about but no one dares to actually be transparent. Most of the time, we felt like it was one big puppet show. That the senior-level people with all the information controlled everything and your leaders really had no idea what's waiting for the team aside from what they could see for next month or quarter. I saw so many teams getting blindsided by "sudden" layoffs. On another note, bad news is discouraged; you never want to report a red status on your project unless you can spin it in a positive way (i.e. you're already working on a solution to fix the problem by next week!). Things move really slowly (as other reviews noted, it is a bank). I think what bothered me the most was that there was rarely any passion and developing employees is typically a second, third, or fourth priority. Of course, the culture across the different sites vary. I love the Brighton, Phoenix and Florida offices! They have a very different, people-oriented culture.