Pros

Professional and flexible work environment. A great place to learn all of the aspects of the lending industry. Daily interactions with various customers, business partners, and upper management make every day different and challenging.

Cons

Frequent periods of high stress. The dillusions out there that consumer finance is a predatory industry. It's NOT.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure employees know how their work is still appreciated despite the struggles of the economy and the level of high loan losses.

Pros

Good place to start out at; gives you a broad knowledge base of the lending industry. You learn alot of the consumer finance world--the financial aspects and customer-service aspects of consumer lending. Also, you become pretty knowledgable about the auto industry as well and able to predict individuals' salaries and wages.

Cons

Field calling accounts--going out to people's houses to collect payments if cannot reach them by phone. Various encounters with customers, some of whom can have a short temper and/or bad attitude. Lending standards vary and approvals change often.

Advice to Senior Management

A better way to communicate approval authorities for individuals and branch managers. More transparency and better communication within its employee network.

Pros

Pay is excellent, salary increase potential every six months, benefits are outstanding including vacation time and holiday/discretionary time off. -

Cons

Poor senior management, tasks gets repetitive, job burn-out is very high, micro-managed constantly, have to field call accounts (travel to customer's home to collect payment)

Advice to Senior Management

When you constantly tighten loan restrictions and expect the same results and loan volume out the the branches, you are going to get very upset employees.

Pros

The only reason to work at American General Finance is to gain some work experience. If you cannot find work elsewhere then at least you gaining a paycheck.

Cons

-Very incompetent staff and managers
- Poor training
- Will force you to work overtime while not paying you for it
- Although you are given vacation days, the managers will attempt to limit when and if you take them. I put in for vacation time 4 months in advance to get married, had it approved by my manager, and later had that approval rescinded a week prior to my departure by the District Manager who cited that it was not a good time to take off from work. I was informed that I had to choose if I wanted to take off and possibly face termination. Eventually the DM approved my vacation time but I was already very upset.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure to hire competent staff and make work enjoyable. Dont threaten.

Pros

I think the pro's most certainly have to do with the office that you work in. I have worked in several office during my 16yrs at AGF and the pro's differ with each one.

Cons

Inconsistancey... Rules tend to change on a day to day basis

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the employees at the branch level. We are the ones who work with and listen to our customers on a day to day bases. If they came into the branch and worked as an employee for a short amouth of time, I think things would be different.

Pros

+ good bonuses depending on performance
+ excellent benefits
+ good management support
+ good location; right in the middle of Evansville

Cons

- schedule is different every week (8am-8pm)
- company suffering due to economic condition; many layoffs recently
- due to lack of staff, vacations were not always allowed

Advice to Senior Management

Make the work enviornment for reps less stressful by allowing different tasks to be performed and be flexible with the sdandards.

Pros

Decent salaries, excellent advancement oppurtunuties, hours of operation are okay, most of the people I work with are good people, you can get tons of useful information working for this company.

Cons

Benefits package is expensive, push to produce loans, push to collect delinquency, push to save charge off when inevitable, trying to sell a 28% APR loan to a P risk no derog customer.

Advice to Senior Management

Sr . management needs to more upfront with their employees. There are a ton of questions we need answered about our future.

Pros

I think that it is a good place to get exposure to the business, learn about lending, retail finance, credit, underwriting, etc.

Cons

While other reviews bash the company for its rates, etc. What company doesn't take steps to maximize profitability? However, there is absolutely no consistency in charging a given rate based on other parameters. There are rate grids, but there are always exceptions (up and down). It is all in the profitability matrix, we lend to higher risk customers, have a higher probability of default and charge higher rates to compensate for it. We all know no one holds a gun to the customers head and forces the customers to sign.

What I don't like is, as of late, the company (owned by AIG) has experienced numerous operational problems, high rates of default, and there had been a lot of question raised about if the company was going to be able to continue operating. There has been absolutely zero transparency from upper management through to the employees regarding the direction of the company and our ability and chances to survive. The lending guidelines have significantly changed and it is extremely difficult to grow (increase receivables by making new loans at a faster rate than taking liquidations and writing off nonperforming loans). The bonus structure for a branch manager is based on not only low delinquency but also a high net operating profit for the branch as well as the ability to grow a certain amount quarterly. With the recent changes in operations, the bonus is nearly an unattainable goal. Without the bonus available and achievable for the Branch Managers, the $50k (plus or minus) base salary is hardly worth the stress, time, and effort required of the position. Especially now that upper management are reducing the number of employees per branch and requiring expanded hours of work from branch staff to collect delinquent loans on late evening nights and weekend days.

Things have changed a lot and until changes are made to improve the working conditions, I would have to recommend employees to come on board as a sponge, absorb as much as they can to be able to learn, and plan on leaving once they have developed a strong base knowledge of the business. With the trimming down of the company, there is likely little chance of promotion, especially with District Managers and positions above that are experiencing demotions down to lower levels.

Also bear in mind that typically across the board, there is a very aggressive requirement and expectation of sales, sales, sales. Employees are expected to sell loans aggressively and offer credit and non credit products along with the loans. You should not even think about having a problem with the company's philosophies (selling higher interest rates on loans, charging loan origination fees that are on the higher end (up to 5% on all loans, even $250,000 real estate loans), prepay penalties of 3%, along with "offering" (including) insurance onto loans, definitely not always with the full disclosure of the voluntary nature of any (included) insurance coverages on the loan.

Advice to Senior Management

I have no advice for upper management, maybe rather a reference to the golden rule. Honesty is always something that I would have liked to have experienced from my boss. I know that I can go to sleep tonight knowing that I have always been 100% honest with my employees about the future of their jobs.

Pros

You will get a lot of inside information on how lending works so you can use this on your personal borrowing needs. It will make you think twice about how you borrow money.

Cons

Do not bring morality to this job; the name of the game is profit. Examples: We have something called Customer appreciation days in November. We invite customer to refinance their account to skip their November and December payments. The purpose of this is to restart their account and collect more interest so we will have a nice profit in January. This of course is not disclosed to our customers and we pretend we are doing this as a favor to them. Management will work with partial truths; for example: when a customer wants a due date change we are encouraged to say we need to refinance their loan in order to do so. This is not true. There are many employees (myself excluded) who will not disclose the fact that there is credit insurance included in a loan. Another thing is the high rates that we charge; we are encouraged to always offer the highest rate possible and then negotiate down if we need to. In some states there is also a 5% fee for processing the loan on top of the higher rate. We are encouraged to offer anywhere from 9% to 18% mortgage loans and use the fact that we can cut the customer's term and save them interest as a selling tool. Are you kidding?

To make a long story short; most of the practices are legal, but they are immoral. If you still decide to work for this company then you must throw out your heart because you will be doing a disservice to your customers and your community as a whole. Treat others the way you want to be treated, don't offer them 30%.

Advice to Senior Management

How do you sleep at night?

Pros

Opens your eye to the meaning of dog eat dog world

Cons

Everything. They are cheap about the salary that they offer, they want you to work hard and say you are doing lousy and make work number 1 and family at the bottom. Then they tell you that you are doing poorly no matter what and then let you go before you qualify for your pension. They also say one thing and do another.

Advice to Senior Management

what goes around comes around.