Citi Reviews in United Kingdom

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – The challenges help you grow

Cons – It is extgremely difficult to progress if you havent entered the company under some sort of management programme

Advice to Senior Management – Stop spending so much on incompetent temps when the work can be done by existing staff by keeping up their morale by giving them decent salaries

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – Large organisation, plenty of room for growth. Strong player in market, looks good on CV. Some good knowledge people you can learn from.

Cons – Communication shockingly poor. Terrible reward and recoginiton schemes. Too many layers of middle management. Has the ability to sap the energy and motivation of people.

Advice to Senior Management – Improve communication. Use people's talents, too many administrative overheads leaves a lot of talented people pushing paper for most of the day.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Citi

Pros – Flexible work pattern
Salary level reasonably competent
Prestigious office if that is your thing
Employee walfare is ok
Good facilities

Cons – Senior Management seem to "manage up"
No regard for a job well done
You will feel like a cog in a machine
Will get rid of people without regard once the going gets tough
Poor at resourcing projects
Are in love with offshoring

Advice to Senior Management – Focusing on offshoring just creates an unstable working environment. Local talent could be procured onshore which would make the whole operation a lot smoother. But as always, nobody will listen ...

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – I joined Citi to travel and have moved two locations in the three years have been here. The place is amazingly diverse. Talented, hard working folks who generally know their stuff. There is name recognition and grudging respect in the outside world. Unlike other regional banks, respect for diversity is significant - no glass ceilings.

Cons – Smaller offices (like Dubai) are very ethnically driven and power centres depend on the ethnic background of the local CCO. Levels of competence vary dramatically and the place is top-heavy. Support functions, especially Human Resources are plain incompetent. While the organisation claims to have more programmers than Microsoft, one would never know - hence Tech and Operations are fossilised.

Advice to Senior Management – Drastic changes needed. Back to basics

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – responsibility
independence
delivery
international
meritocratic

Cons – need a sponsor
very parochial
not enough weightage given to countries
too NY centric
does not care enough about its employees

Advice to Senior Management – go and speak with the troops
morale is very low and people are demotivated
focus on doing the right thing by the customer and the employee
get rid of the people who bought us into this mess in the 1st place

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – training is quite good when available. experience gained of working for global company.

Cons – Departments work in silos. inter department communication difficult. Working with Distributed teams uneccessarily problematic. knoweldge retention

Advice to Senior Management – Instigate some basic IT standards. CMM Itil etc

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Citi

Pros – Citigroup is a large, well known company, so it is good to have something like this on your CV. Also, compared to other places where a programmer may work, Citi pays quite well and the work hours are not particularly demanding either; usually the floor I work on is empty around 5.30pm.

Cons – Things happen very slowly! There is a Virtual Request system which every process goes through, it is painfully slow, involves too many departments and requires too many signatures. The problem is there are too many steps required to do something small, and the departments which carry out these steps are sometimes very short of staff or short of staff who are actually able to do what is required.

This is perhaps a problem which affects many other companies, but basically, there are too many workers who are incompetent in their current roles accompanied by even worse managers who seem to think their department is a separate company and thus do not cooperate very well with other departments.

Also, remember that this is a bank, if you are looking for a challenging role which involves the implementation of some fairly new technology (as advertised by HR), look elsewhere. It can be a relaxing place to work, however, after a while, relaxing becomes boring and you may find yourself watching pointless training videos about Microsoft Office to pass the time.

Advice to Senior Management – Trust your employees. Perhaps it would be better to do this after you get rid of some of them, but in my opinion, splitting tasks into so many parts in order to prevent somebody from screwing up is not a very efficient way of working; if you are worried about this, why did you hire them? It is no use E-mailling employees to tell them to feel empowered when you don't actually trust what they are doing.

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – Depending for what department and what organisation within Citi you are working, it is a good place to work. Compensation packages have been above banking average, company offers excellent internal and external training possibilities for beginners and skilled staff as well, strong commitment to diversity, interesting travel possibilities if working for a global or regional organisation, good possibility to learn how a world wide operating enterprise is organised and working, good place to learn how to read and listen "between the lines", good place to learn the importency of politics and that being in the right "Club" will help to survive, good place to learn something about the cultural differences of how some work task are understood and worked.

Cons – To much to write here. Citi has a horrifying week Senior Management, with no Leadership, No truth, No trust anymore. Speaking about my experiences, to much and permanent reorganisations, producing confusion and frustration for staff and customers. If you join Citi in EMEA you have to know the right people, and being located in London is as well a big advantage for your career. Anyway, if you do not belong to the right "Club" you will never be promoted at all, regardless of your location or if you are working you ass off. Promotions are usually based on politics not on skills or performance. As a result you will find many nope heads within leading positions only because they belong to the right inner circle, to the right "Club". To many managers listen to the wrong people and wasting the companies money with ridiculous strategic decisions based on wrong assumptions given by clueless nope heads. You will find a world full of fear, where the few good people left have to be very quite to avoid to get there heads cut off in the next "right placement" round. High skilled people and teams, capable to manage issues quick and efficient have been fired. Their core knowledge is wasted and gone, their responsibilities have been moved to so called "low cost" locations. As a result, customer dissatisfaction has been increased, service levels have gone down. If you don't care about the company you work for, if you could talk the talk, if you like to play dirty political games, if you already know the right people to avoid a "right placement", Welcome to join the madhouse !. But if pointless processes, permanent reorganisations and obviously wrong strategic decisions might frustrate you easily, if you like to work customer orientated, quick and efficient, if you easily might loose you politeness on phone, because you have to talk again with a clueless peanuts paid "low cost" location monkey, then stay out of Citi, this is not the right place for you.

Advice to Senior Management – Hopeless to advice anything to these lost in space people. Therefore, Go home all of you !!! , take your clueless "club" members with you and come never back again. Ah yes, and pay your bonuses of the last 5 years back as a minimum compensation for what you have done to my company and the lower rank people !

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – Rewards dynamic personalities. Citigroup's overall market presence means you get to work on interesting deals & the organisation has lots of resources (if you know where to look).

Cons – Bureaucracy too big. Success at the highest levels requires organisational perceptiveness which is hard to learn if you don't naturally have it.

Advice to Senior Management – Think and act faster, more decisively

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Citi

Pros – Camaradie of the people in the company. Though everyone was self-employed, people rallied round to help one another to progress the ranks. Everyone, at some point would have experienced whatever it is you are going through and therefore can share some of their personal stories of encouragement. The culture was one of learn by doing, which for me is the best method of learning. One is able to demonstrate practically the do's and dont's of running your own business. With a history of 30 years tried and tested model in the USA, there is a wealth of experience to be tapped into.

Cons – Due to the self-employed nature of working at Citisolutions, there is no real accountability. Each person/business is accountable to itself. The processes and structures for control are lacking or not up to what you would expect from a structured environment. Due to the fact that the business model accommodates people from all works of life, you are sometimes working with people who are very different in terms of educational background and may sometimes find it difficult to engage in what I would call 'intelligent conversation'. The operations division was not very competent due to a lack of consistent staff or better still revolving staff and postal mail concerning compensations went missing regularly

Advice to Senior Management – Attention to detail in the areas of operational processes, quality of business owners through proper screening, proper training and industry standard compensation for operational and admin staff. The processes and structures for control are lacking or not up to what you would expect from a structured environment. Due to the fact that the business model accommodates people from all works of life, you are sometimes working with people who are very different in terms of educational background and may sometimes find it difficult to engage in what I would call 'intelligent conversation'. The operations division was not very competent due to a lack of consistent staff or better still revolving staff and postal mail concerning compensations went missing regularly

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend