In Decline - Operations Analyst Citco Employee Review

Technology - Citco has saddled it's employees with a decaying system that hasn't been updated or revamped successfully in many, many years. As the company has grown larger and the client books more diversified the reconciliation process at Citco has become more and more manual. Where we used to use a web based system to automatically compile broker data and internal data to check for discrepancies, that system can no longer handle the volume. Instead of upgrading it, we now rely on a few key people to write macros in excel to handle the work. Overall this has bottomed out productivity per employee here over at least the last 5 years. There are some groups in operations that only have work to do around month end. For the remaining 3 weeks or so of the month they sit idly with nothing to do. Literally nothing. Citco's response to every situation is to throw more people at it, never to upgrade the tech. Hours - The workday in the middle office is 8am-6pm. We utilize about 40/200 hours per month per employee. The rest is spent sitting around listening to the clock tick. Managers NEVER let anyone go early, it's infuriating. Suggestions to shorten the hours have been met with absolute vitriol and tongue lashings by senior management. Mobility - Everything that Citco has to offer an employee is centered around accounting/operations. There is no front office, you will not have the opportunity to work on a trading desk. You will need to subject yourself to a large amount of nepotism and brown nosing if you want to get on the inside of the clique. For the most part clients look on us as a necessary evil, making it hard to use Citco as a vault in to the hedge fund world. Using Industry Knowledge - Everything you know slowly fades when you're employed at Citco. There is basically no need to have any prior industry knowledge to work here. Exotic product types (and many vanilla types) don't function in our system correctly, so all you ever learn is how to make them work, not how they actually perform. I feel I have actually lost my edge in my time here. Bonus - For the past 2 years Citco has declined to pay employee bonuses, and declined to give out raises. No one expected to get paid a bonus at the end of 2008, but we were sorely disappointed to see it happen again at the end of 2009, a year when all of our clients were celebrating their resurgence by handsomely paying their employees. Office - Citco's Jersey City office is a lab maze of cubes. It is as utilitarian as possible with all the charm of a high school cafeteria. The restrooms here are woefully insufficient for the number of employees. All of the men have horror stories about never being able to get a stall on any of Citco's 3 floors. Some of them go to other buildings to use the restroom.