Now within the first year of being with the company as it's gone through changes over the course of it's merger (FIS acquisition of Worldpay/Vantiv), it has turned into a nightmare, introducing the following:
- Just because it's change-centered doesn't mean people make a dutiful effort to change, especially leadership. The whole "too big to fail" is not true for this company because in many ways it is failing. They retained a hiring freeze for nearly one half of 2022, and continuously keep going back into a hiring freeze mode multiple times throughout the years.
- Leadership can host large staff meetings all they want emphasizing "culture" and "industry growth", but executives flat out told people there wasn't going to be pay increases as we're enduring global inflation nor bonuses given...except for managers. When I was hired, I was promised a 7% bonus...and then in one year, that was taken away from me. So you can join and at any point in time, this company will turn around and pull the rug right out from under you.
- Good example of this is in the first year of removing the bonus, they offered people a stock that is inaccessible for two years. So they dangled $2k money over our heads that we couldn't touch and called it a "bonus". In Fidelity, it's literally called the "FIS RESTRICTED STOCK PLAN". It's currently down $500 because of how bad FIS is doing in the stock market.
- Which speaking of stock, the 401k: So at first, we were with Vanguard. No complaints there. However, FIS decides, "let's switch to Fidelity," and does so while all markets are down. This causes a monetary loss in funds. I mean I alone lost several thousand from that transition and I was given no control of it. FIS had Fidelity move everything within a 45 day period, and all we got were notices before and after. That's it.
- Our network structure is atrocious. Upon merging, FIS left networks separated. So we've got an FIS network (FIS VPN) and a Worldpay network (Vantiv VPN), but neither is allowed to talk to one another. Very problematic when you have FIS technologies that are being pushed onto Worldpay teams, and they can't access them over the network without switching back and forth between FIS VPN and Vantiv VPN. Not to mention, network is trying to force us into using a new VPN client which is leading to security scrutinizing teams into having to revise their entire application environments so they're "properly labeled". I've worked in other companies where there was a major project, budget, and resources which covered migrations for hundreds of application teams, but in FIS, the burden is put back on the application teams to figure out. Same goes for the cloud - we've got FIS in Azure and Worldpay in AWS. Why are we using two different cloud service providers? It honestly makes no sense and is too financially burdensome to go down this route. Isn't Worldpay part of FIS? Doesn't seem like it.
- The same goes for software and licensing. This is the strictest environment I've ever worked in, and that's saying something...I've worked in industries which deal with military and government systems. Yet in FIS we're heavily restricted behind a tool called Beyond Trust (more like Beyond Distrust) wherein a team is blocking any attempts we make to install or use applications we require on a day-to-day basis. It's been over a year of this, and while we were told a couple months back Beyond Trust was going away, it's only gotten worse. I had one app that had been blocked with a ticket generated, and not a single person worked on the ticket for two weeks until I said something. Now they're saying I need to go before a software approval board. Why is that something I NEED to do? Why are we spending time and resources on this?
- FIS is a large company with over 55,000 employees, the majority of which (35,000) is in India. Now imagine that you're onshore and you require support for many of these issues and tickets. Who do you think handles most of your support? Offshore. What do you think happens when you need help? You are stuck waiting DAYS, sometimes WEEKS, before you can get anything done. There's a general phone support, but they're severely limited to password resets and maybe the occasional quick fix in Windows. There's local IT, but they're severely limited due to Beyond Trust not permitting anyone admin rights. So as an employee, you are constantly made to feel stuck. VPN down? Incident ticket will take a few days before resolved. Access request? IAM ignores it for a week. Firewall? Going to take two-three weeks before processed. It's as if no one really thought this through and just said, "hey, let's keep expanding because it makes us money." I'm not even joking.
- Performance reviews ie Performance 365? We have to submit those 4 times a year. Unless you say anything about wanting to get promotion, you won't get one. Maybe you'll get a salary bump, but don't expect a career trajectory when most roles are being covered by someone overseas who's availability is limited and responsiveness is nonexistent. And employees asked leadership to make this 2 times a year instead, but leadership didn't want to commit to making any changes.
- FIS hands out for free a coffee cup and cheap plastic sunglasses, but can't be bothered to issue FIS-branded laptop bags or shirts for free. Employees have to purchase FIS-branded items out of pocket. I even tried to order a laptop bag because I wasn't given one upon joining and they're asking people to return to office more. You know what I received? An generic off-brand bag. If FIS is doing so well, why is it so cheap? Why do employees have to shop the FIS store for FIS branded products? And if you're like, "but they give you free food, right?" The only reason the free food seems to be a thing this year is because they're desperately trying to get employees to return to offices more. It's very obvious people don't want to have to go in, and if they do, go in more than 1 day a week. Maybe a small few want to go into offices more often, but most employees are too used to working from home now that FIS needs to get with the culture shift and stop trying to force something that isn't going to happen. Funnily enough, they did this with Covid vaccinations and forced people to leave by Dec 2021 if they weren't vaccinated in time. But then guess what? We heard last week the Covid vaccine requirement was lifted so no one has to be vaccinated anymore...
- We only went up 1 point from last year's employee survey to this year's if that's telling you something. Leadership says they "take this very seriously", and that's what's the biggest joke here - Leadership can say all they want, but until they make a full commitment to resolve these problems, the problems will persist again and again and the turnover rate is going to keep going up.
