I had considered myself a "lifer" pre-merger. I assumed I would be there until retirement but sadly, with the merger and the evolution of how the job functions were executed and with high turnover and massive staffing shortages in key support areas in many departments (layoffs occurred primarily before merger announcement) I felt compelled to leave.
EXTREMELY inefficient in many processes due to the centralization of many job functions. Tasks that would take me minutes to do myself in previous years would take 24-48 hours due to having to submit requests to a centralized group for processing. By the way, the time to submit the requests often met or exceeded the time it previously would have taken me to do it myself. Couple that with having to assume some support responsibilities of other departments who were understaffed (due to layoffs) and add to that the fact that so many things just didn't work and no one seemed to know what to do or where to go to get answers just made the situation untenable. In addition to that, the amount of technology issues were profound and tech support was abysmal (I'm assuming due to short staff...probably from layoffs). I've had discussions with former colleagues in various roles associated with Private Wealth client services that are now at other firms and from what I'm hearing, clients are calling them to move assets and relationships as quickly as possible due to the extreme issues they're currently experiencing. That is not a recipe for success.
