Pros
• The salary is decent. • Many colleagues are genuine, kind people. • Attitudes to flexibility (at least in terms of hybrid working between remote and the office) seem to be fairly positive.
Kontras
• It's a Swindon-based company and it shows. The language and positioning are highly localised and there's either very little ambition or very little talent available to expand horizons. All the focus is on the adviser network with no attention paid to the outside world. • Industry experience far outranks skills and specialisms, so there's a lot of people who know a good deal about financial services but have no idea how to do anything that's actually useful. • Fear of all things modern tech is rampant, and application of cybersecurity/IT best practice is incredibly patchy. There's a blanket ban on AI (but no formal policy - go figure) but it's application is a car crash: you can't access Grammarly, but you can get onto the OpenAI website to use ChatGPT. Zero consistency, zero talent, just hours and hours of mandatory training from an IT department that talks like a strongman but swings like an asthmatic baboon. • Commitment to DEI is performative at best and downright absent at worst. There's no dedicated DEI team, and there's no drive behind any DEI initiatives. • It's all just a bit boring. There's no excitement, no pep, no real reason to enjoy any part of your job. There's potential there for sure, but no one has the gumption or the wherewithal to do anything about it.