Barclaycard Reviews

Pros

not much overtime normal hours

Cons

too many politics please do your work

Advice to Senior Management

work harder

Pros

- Good compensation for either FTE or contract staff. Bonus is "ok" for financial services company, if you consider the economic climate and how boring the products actually are.
- You can select the office location, either Northampton or Canary Wharf for management, more locations for non-management staff.
- The colleagues are well educated, very social, friendly/polite and from good backgrounds. Capable.
- There is a lot you can learn within the payments/credit card industry.

Cons

POLITICS:
The amount of politics is mind-blowing. Barely anything gets done unless it goes up and down the entire hierarchy. Decisions-making, product-development and strategy processes will take ages. I have spent 1 year in this company and we as a team have not delivered anything so far.

PRODUCTS
Credits cards cater for a specific market and customer segment. Future of payments technology and processes is a question mark. Strong competition from all sides, i.e. which are more innovative and interesting/appealing to customers.

Work attitude
People are hired to get warm bodies onto seats and to keep them busy (at least trying to keep them busy). Nothing significant gets done in BC Global or BCE.

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership is not connected to the actual staff and live in their own world. Management team are certainly capable of understanding subject matter but otherwise not capable of anything else, i.e. innovations or managing staff.

Pros

Career and performance development is quite decent for the kind of company this is

Cons

Work pace is insanely tiring and often not very rewarding

Advice to Senior Management

Try to focus more on quality than quantity of work

Pros

Global exposure for someone looking forward to having some international exposure.

Cons

A bit too competitive at times.

Pros

Very friendly environment, colleagues are respectful, opportunities to interesting work. Salary is generally competitive in the industry, but benefit package and flxibility is good.

Cons

Management structure is complicated and there may be lots of operational bureaucracy. Barclays is sometime not sure what exact working environment and practice it wants to create and promote. Performance review process can be very complicated.

Pros

- Conveniently located near New York city
- Opportunities for international travel (if you are lucky)
- Good work life balance
- Some teams/managers are good to work with

Cons

- No clear path for career advancement and growth
- Management doesn't care for employee development and training
- Some managers are good number crunchers, but extremely immature when it comes to people management
- Out of the box thinking is extremely limited
- Back-office feel, bit disconnected from day-to-day business action overseas
- Performance evaluation process is not very transparent, and big time faviouratism exists. Brown nosing is your biggest asset, team players are not recognized.
- Extremely vertical management structure, where senior management is not very approachable

Advice to Senior Management

- Please seek out training on how to manage and lead your team
- Team will respond better to better transparency and trust
- Just saying "thank you" and "good job" can go a long way in building employee morale
- Stop taking people for granted

Pros

Used to be a good brand in the card industry

Cons

New CEO came in from Amex. Pretty weak leadership accross the board. Seems to have issues with trusting people and delegating.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to empower people more, need less micromanagement

Pros

The company in general is well run, flexible and provides good opportunity for advancement

Cons

The amount of red tape to jump through in order to get anything done sucks the life and energy out of you. As an employee transfered across in an acquisition, with one of the major factors being speed of deployment, I watched as the red tape was wrapped around the company until all were suffocated of any ingenuity. That said it's a huge company and not disimilar, in that respect, to others that I have worked for.

Advice to Senior Management

Find a happy medium that allows you to progress and benefit your customers that doesn't involve a gung ho approach of a start up company, but also isn't stagnated by 3-4 year programs to deliver new IT systems.

Pros

Very good compensation plan especially when compared with other organisations or similar roles. Good work life balance with abilty to work from home

Cons

Very political and hiearachical environment, compensation programm might drive in appropriate behaviour, decsions not made in a timely and effective manner

Advice to Senior Management

Skip level meetings important to get a true perspective of the organisation. Speak to the grass root teams to get a true perspective o customer experiences