- Commissions are both capped and largely dependent on who walks through your doors. Don't let them sell you on the phone calls thing, chances are your assigned book of business has been worked over for years. This means your success/$$$ is dependent on your branch assignment, NOT hard work or your ability to sell. I cannot overstate this point. Make them show you the branch banker performance for the past year before accepting an assignment.
- It's a retail setting rather than a professional one. This means anyone from the public can walk into the bank and right up to your desk with service demands and/or personal problems while sometimes debasing you throughout the process. Some of them will become regulars. These are not opportunities to earn trust with valued clients through "customer obsession," they are a demoralizing drain on your time and energy.
- I got lucky with my manager but there are some pretty bad ones out there who can make your day to day work life torturous with micromanagement and shame tactics. Hearing other bankers' horror stories at events was a regular occurrence.
- Annual banker bonuses were eliminated and replaced with quarterly bonuses related to customer satisfaction surveys. Aside from the fact many customers can never be pleased and will happily destroy your quarter with a bad review, you also are just one person. If one or more people in your branch are bad with customer service or simply have a bad day your personal bonus will suffer.
- A majority of your commissions will come from someone else closing the deals you send them, which means once again your level of success is not completely in your control. If your Financial Advisor isn't hungry or a closer you're screwed.
- Transfers and promotions are hard to come by. Once they hire you into a position they typically want to keep you there. They accomplish this with all of the usual corporate nonsense like setting up moving goalposts, backroom discussions with leadership, claims you're better off, etc. it's all a distraction.
- Many branches are woefully understaffed. This means you will be working long hours and hard days, often focused on things and people who offer little opportunity (pure service for low tier prospects).
- It's clear to me the shareholders resent retail bankers' existence. They are trying very hard to automate us out of existence but since they're not quite there yet they are instead cutting salaries/commissions/bonuses, demanding increases in quality/quantity of work, and attempting to make us feel responsible for all those things listed above that are, once more for the road, out of our control.
