Pros
There were somewhat okay health benefits…
Cons
EVERYTHING ELSE. I have decided I would never work at another bank again after working here. My personal morals, mental health, self esteem, and overall happiness had never been so questionably low except when I was employed here. The bank showed their true self, and the particular staff I worked with did not help during COVID. I was downright miserable. I did not agree with calling clients (who had been waiting months for their stimulus checks) to ask if they want to take their stimulus check funds and open a new credit card or open a loan (mind you, most people were getting laid off left and right waiting for these checks to appear so they could put food on the table and pay living expenses). I felt these were predatory tactics I did not feel right about, but they were watching my numbers or I’d lose my job. I was not comfortable with it, despite my manager constantly reminding me, “Thousands of people would love to replace you and have your job. You should be GRATEFUL you’re still even here right now.” My boundaries were practically non-existent as an hourly employee when I was always getting called either in the early mornings before I left my house, or evenings when I had gotten home, from my manager reaming me for every little thing I did wrong (even though you’re forced to be staffed at just 2 people to run the bank, which makes it difficult to perfectly run dual control procedures every single time when the bank gets busy and customers are getting mad they’re waiting) so I was denied personal boundaries or any kind of work-life balance. My immature coworker was verbally abusive, taking every opportunity to degrade my intelligence and character based on my clothes, my age, and my experience and made the bank a very toxic work environment. She also never failed to ask me inappropriate and uncomfortable personal questions to “get a rise out of me”. Academy Bank, as far as I can recall, is also a 2nd chance bank, which means we’re subjected to less than ideal bank customers of the general public, and expected to put up with verbal abuse, harassment, and uncomfortable conversations. I’ve had a customer throw his debit card at me because there were fraudulent charges on his card because we “weren’t doing our jobs blocking these transactions”. This especially was a problem when it came to the check processing system when we did teller work and had to process checks with a complicated, time-consuming process to “verify” but “not really verify” the checks but if we found the check bounced at all that would be our jobs. Not to mention. we’d get yelled at by clients who did not like us “taking so long” to take their check, or ask “why can’t you take this, I get this every month?”. The technology is terrible, we were expected to open all our accounts on iPads that lost connection, lost our data at the end of the account opening process, sometimes signatures got lost, or pages timed out and therefore we were expected to rely on such unreliable technology for opening accounts. I get their intention with the kiosks were to make banking more accessible to the public by not having to provide traditional banking housing and structure, but it was obnoxious having to make clients use the kiosks to “FaceTime” other staff or Universal Bankers for what I could do myself for them at the teller desk in-person. We were constantly pit against the universal bankers because we didn’t want to take responsibility for taking a potentially bad check, and told if anything went wrong it “should be put on them”. I could go on and on how awful my time was at Academy Bank here, but what I can say at this point is I saw how predatory the bank became to “survive COVID” and how toxic the work environment became, which was only adding more oxygen to the complete dumpster fire of my stressful work relationships with with my manager and abusive coworker. Please, avoid this bank, as a customer and as an employer.