Silicon Valley Bank Reviews

Cons

Some internal systems are outdated and clunky, and that can be seen as a hindrance when your primary client base are the leading and cutting edge companies in the tech and startup industry.

Cons

finding a good work life balance

Cons

Systems / infrastructure needs some TLC

Cons

Management is failing the individual contributors. We have had two organized walk outs/teams quiting within the organization. In IT we had almost the entire network team quite all within 1 week and on the business side we had an entire PES team walk out on the same day across two offices. If this isn't a heads up to management then I don't know what else will.

In IT all we see is micro management, a senior leadership of yes men and a culture of fear and retribution. Management says one things but does something completely different.

Example, SVB' has a documented work from home policy and a process to implement a work from home schedule but the leadership team questions anyone that has followed this process and has a work from home schedule on place.

Currently our longtime CSO has been promoted to CIO and hoping that he will see the dysfunction within the IT org, specifically Engineering and Operations and work to fix it as soon as possible before we lose many more talented people.

Cons

growing pains trying to scale

Cons

We have an unique situation at SVB - the CFO org is on a spending spree and COO org is very tight with money. The CFO org has spent millions on creating several decks that are supposedly strategies for transforming the company, but is essentially shelf ware. Not one change has been made that improves client onboarding. And no change will be made this year based on the type of leaders we have leading this transformation. The leaders are just clueless- you cannot change the company’s entire digital platform, CRM platform, client onboarding platform and loan onboarding platform all at the same time. These have to be sequenced in the right order, else none of this will get delivered even in 5 years.

Also agree with previous reviewer - too many heads in the transformation team, with no hands to actually do the work. Everyone is a leader, process owner, execution head, program manager, scrum master, architect etc.! All these people can only create decks, not make any actual improvement. The pyramid is oddly reversed in SVB. 50 people are hired to manage 5 actual people doing the work.

Work culture is also quite toxic. I came from another larger bank, and the politics here overtakes all the work. There are several cliques, and all people do is bring down everyone else. Work done by other teams is often criticized. Leaders at the top do this all the time, and the culture just permeates through.

Cons

Relative to my experience & placement within the bank: some areas of the organization lack effective leadership. Some strategic posts where not well vetted.

Cons

COO has no idea what going on just wants to save money

Cons

White male dominated and tendency. Lack of leadership in certain departments and promotions not made on merit.

Cons

Unrealistic expectations and lack of definition in the role.