Pros
- With such a variety of roles, it can be a great spot to get initial experience in the financial services industry. They also are good about giving you a chance to move to other departments so you can find the business line that is the best fit for you. - Decent match on the 401k plan and good fund choices. A stock purchase plan was also available. They also added more vacation time to help with morale (unfortunately, in my experience, people frequently were unable to use all of their days off due to heavy workloads and difficulty getting others to fill in for anyone out of the office). - Once my company was acquired by FIS, we moved to casual attire for the week and jeans on Fridays. Before that, all the men wore ties and the attire was more formal.
Cons
- Compensation is below market value. FIS has a rigid conformity to job bands that limit your salary levels and potential annual increases. My group had a number of people outperforming their roles that hadn't had a meaningful salary increase in a couple of years. My manager wanted to bump pay to correct for these people but kept getting stonewalled by the FIS accounting dept. - My company was acquired by FIS. People initially stuck around to work through the transition with hope that we would have more resources as part of a larger company. The benefits improved but many were disappointed with how stingy FIS was about increasing staffing in critical areas. People who remained had to cover for those that left with little training while still doing their full time work. The result was a wave of burnout and lots of employee turnover, which led to rising bad morale bordering on cynicism among those that remained. I experienced this burnout too, having to correct issues in other groups because they couldn't handle their work loads and were letting things slip that negatively impacted clients. I got worn out by consistently needing to do work that other groups should have been doing (in addition to my own work) without any kind of recognition. Since I left, I heard that a number of the senior managers have left. - After we were acquired by FIS, there were a number of integration issues. We had to adapt a lot of the parent company technology without enough time to train on it or customize it to support our existing clients. Also, we didn't get a great sense of how we fit into the bigger corporate strategy, so it was hard to identify with the parent company. - After we were acquired, our internal IT support staff was gradually wound down and we had to adapt FIS's IT support structure. Despite trying to get good information from the intranet site, the procedure became very confusing. Different numbers and IT teams for different requests. Onboarding new hires was extremely frustrating because you had to wait for a computer to be shipped from a central location after all kinds of protected software was installed. As a result, new employees would sometimes not have a computer to work on for a week after starting. For a technology company, I found the lack of consistent IT support to be astounding. - FIS is a large company so I know they need to have cost controls in place, but we had major issues trying to increase headcount. We were already understaffed heading into our acquisition (management wanted to stay lean to be a more appealing target). We couldn't even cover the rate of attrition fast enough and certainly couldn't get approval to restore critical groups so they could provide a high level of service. As a result, service levels suffered and significant clients have left over the past year. FIS set aggressive client growth targets but it's hard to hit those targets when your staff can't keep up with the current number of clients.