Bakkt reviews

2.7

28% would recommend to a friend

(127 total reviews)

Gavin Michael

24% approve of CEO

23% positive business outlook

Bakkt has an employee rating of 2.7 out of 5 stars, based on 127 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Bakkt employee rating is 27% below average for employers within the Financial Services industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

127 reviews
1.0
May 27, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

LOL Glassdoor makes you type 5 words in the "pros" section. I cannot come up with anything positive about Bakkt. If I could give zero stars, I would.

Cons

If you are considering leaving your current job for a position at Bakkt, BEWARE. You will regret your decision. Bakkt has gone downhill at a rapid pace. 1. The number of departures at varying levels of the organization should be a BIG RED FLAG that this place is terrible. Several C-level departures, dozens of Managers, Directors, Department VPs, and dozens of individual contributors. I have never seen anything like it. For months, the executive team told everyone that “attrition is normal when a company goes public” and “it is business, people come and go. It is natural”. They said those things for as long as they could before the departures continued to get worse, and then they stopped addressing it in the all hands meetings 2. The executive team is clueless. All of the executives are friends or former colleagues of the CEO. They were put into their positions and are not qualified to run an organization as evidenced by the poor decision making 3. The executive team is dishonest on multiple fronts a. They blatantly lie to clients about EVERYTHING. On a call with a client, the executives tell their clients that they are invested in their business, they are their top priority. On internal calls, the CEO said in an all hands meeting that he wants to get clients he actually wants, not the clients he inherited from previous leadership. He and the rest of the executives also regularly tell the team that we need to control the client and show them who is in control here, even though performance with the clients has been terrible for months consecutively b. The number of departures has gotten so bad that they now try to hide it from clients. The executive team released direction to say that we are no longer allowed to communicate any attrition to clients, because clients are getting concerned. When people in heavy client interaction roles resign, they try to have them NOT say anything to clients before their departure, so that the executive team can make up reasons about why the employee left. It has happened multiple times 4. For the first year and a half of Bakkt coming in, all they shouted about was the app, the app, the app. After lying to the company for over a year about the performance of the app, they finally changed their tune 5. They are bringing in waves of new leaders to replace everyone who has left. They are telling all of the incoming leaders that the previous executive team were a bunch of idiots and that’s why the business is failing. But the business started to fail when the CEO and his friends took over and started making decisions 6. To try to save employees (because everyone was/is leaving) they offered a BS retention bonus to select employees, but you had to stay for two years to get it and if you left anytime before then, you would have to pay the first installment back, but you wouldn’t even get the first installment until one year in. They tried to swing this as a recognition bonus for everyone’s hard work. LOL. 7. No one in the company got a performance evaluation. Instead, we all got a flat 10% raise – again, another tactic to retain people. This is great when you consider the average annual raise is less than 10%, but it sucks when you know that everyone in the company got the same increase including people who hardly work versus those who work 12 hour days. It shows that everyone is valued the same. The communication was also poor as it was released in a companywide email, not communicated by managers 8. We are constantly being asked to lie to or manipulate clients to hide how bad things are internally 9. The HR team collects feedback from key people who leave, but they do nothing with it. The HR leaders acknowledge how bad it is, but they don’t take action. It is almost as if the HR leaders are scared to go against the CEO 10. They talk so badly about really good people who have left the company. Instead of recognizing that they have really big problems and fixing them, they spend their time bashing the very people they tried to beg to stay. Once someone denies their request to stay, they become enemy #1 and their name is run through the mud. This has happened with several people and as recent as TODAY, they are still doing it 11. The all hands meetings are a JOKE. When anyone asks difficult questions about the mass departures or the leveling exercise or pay increases, the question is met with attitude and a fluff answer is given Joining Bakkt was the worst mistake I ever made. I hope I can stop you from doing the same.

2.0
Dec 22, 2021

A sad future

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Working on new product relating to loyalty programs and crypto.

Cons

Since the CEO has taken the helm, he's insolated himself with an executive team of idiotic new bankers. These people are dinosaurs, lack any vision. Number one priority was to go public, even though our product has terrible engagement. They try to trick investors on how many users are actually doing anything of value across the platform. Hint, not much. Due to this, they don't care about the mobile app at all, and instead try to convince the rest of the company that we're a B2B2C company, and always have been! Now the focus is try and embed Bakkt into partner apps. Every week we have these terrible Thank You all hands meetings. A bad joke where the CEO runs a clown show of a presentation, reporting on metrics that don't matter to try and convince everyone we're on the right track. They delayed a reorganization for months stringing along the employees. When we went public, the leadership team enriched themselves and now we're seeing founding executives leaving. There's been an egress of many of the smarter people, and I can't blame them.

1.0
Mar 13, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pockets of good teams and good micro cultures, inconsistent though.

Cons

The C-Suite, new CEO (first time CEO) has brought in people who are not qualified to build programs, products, close deals, etc. additionally. Significant creation. of a clique-ish culture. Employees are NOT valued accordingly within the company, the top of the house straight up does not care ( or perhaps know how) to provide support to teams via staffing, clear strategic direction, professional development, etc. As an example, look at recent departures over last 8 to 10 months, nearly all of the previous leaders have left.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 127 Reviews

Glassdoor has 130 Bakkt reviews submitted anonymously by Bakkt employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Bakkt is right for you.