Pros
The starting salary is 50,000 for CAs.
Cons
Working at Ayco is a good job for someone who is an account manager or even a financial analyst. But it is not a good atmosphere for client analysts because they are the individuals that everyone dumps the work they don’t want to do on. They are also the individuals that warrant the least amount of respect and camaraderie in the Ayco environment - financial analysts and account managers gossip about and browbeat them behind closed doors. Instead of putting the onus on account managers, who are supposed to be the team leaders and manage the workload of their underlings (one client analysts and one financial analyst), upper management will always back account managers because they will hear back from Goldman if they fail to retain those workers. Ultimately, this means they fail to set reasonable standards for client analysts and sometimes financial analysts as well. Although the client analyst positions are advertised as career development programs to recent graduates, this is not a good first job out of college because it requires a level of boundary-setting with immediate and regional management that most seasoned professionals don’t have mastery of. That is why there are always so many available positions with Ayco - the turnover for these lower positions is very high, with some account managers going through four or five client analysts in a year.