Bread Financial reviews

First and foremost is the culture and I'm not referring to beer on tap or foosball tables. Prior to the acquisition Bread Payments had a strong culture of empowerment and rational inquiry. Individuals were empowered and encouraged to own and drive the parts of the business they touched. Goals were established by leadership with input from all throughout the business and solutions were crafted from the bottom up, that no longer exists. The company has adopted a different philosophy, one of top-down decision making where user-centricity and decisions based on data/research are larger ignored if it doesn't align with the Highest Paid Person's opinion. The organization is full of smart and passionate individuals who care about the business, the product, and the consumer but they are not empowered to make a difference or help drive the business. The second, and closely aligned with culture, is hiring. The company is in the midst of a large exodus of talent, especially on the Bread Payments side. While this is not ideal for an organization it is manageable and can be compensated for by hiring equally great talent. This can be done by bringing in individuals with strong backgrounds from across a multitude of experiences, organizations, and business verticals. Unfortunately, the company has decided to hire from two distinct organizations, JP Morgan Chase and CitiBank. While there is nothing wrong with bringing on talented people from those two companies, we are ONLY hiring people from those two companies which is starting to homogenize our organization. There is no variation in ideas or processes and the company risks establishing a myopic view on how to conduct business. As any great financial analyst would tell you, DIVERSIFY!!!! Executive Leader is risking the potential that the business has by hiring people with the same ideas instead of hiring people that would challenge those ideas. And lately, and I can't stress this one enough, stop associating employees with cost. I have attended way too many meetings where the only attribute associated with employees is their cost. Employees are not an expense they are an investment. As part of the Senior Leader team, I'm aware of the budget implications that payroll plays and how we have to find the right balance between payroll and revenue. Well in order to hit those revenue numbers we need to drive business goals and outcomes and guess who drives those outcomes and goals. EMPLOYEES!!! Executive leadership needs to understand that words and phrasing matter and when the people who are driving the outcomes that will make this company successful constantly hear about how much they cost, you create an environment that demotivates them and diminishes their true value to the organization.

First the basics: Alliance Data bought Bread in 2020, recently adopted its name and re-branded as a tech-first company. I'm pretty sure all they wanted to keep was the name. Recently, leadership froze hiring, refused to backfill positions, gutted the talent acquisition team, limited states we could hire in... they even turned off slack. Seemed like bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. After a year operating as a separate brand, and hiring aggressively under that impression during that time, a new CTO joined, Matt Brown - who has never written a line of code - and decided overnight that the two brands would be one. To explain, they sent emails using the word strategy a lot and promised they'd resume hiring after concluding their strategic assessment for capacity planning (it's been since January). So, they didn't say why. And they refused to interrupt their strategic assessment while developers leaked out at the rate of 2-3 per week. CEO Ralph Andretta, on an all hands call, after the last member of the Bread C-Suite had departed (they started trickling out since the summer), actually offered an explanation that made sense: Bread higher-ups had to go because Alliance Data didn't like them. Kudos for the only honest explanation. It's not fair to judge the entire company on this. You might find a team that's a step up for you in your career. But if you're looking for something classy, specifically in the tech sector, Bread has instead been refurbished as a relic where people in nice suits use the word "strategy" too much. Or in their language: "a publicly traded provider of loyalty and marketing services, such as private label credit cards, coalition loyalty programs, and direct marketing, derived from the capture and analysis of transaction-rich data."