Unhappy faces everywhere - Anonymous employee BBVA Employee Review

1.0
12 Dec 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1) Accumulated work related knowledge per person is quite astonishing. People are on average better at what they are doing compared to other companies I have worked at. 2) Food served for lunch is nice. 3) There are some departments you can work without experiencing most of the cons listed below. Thus some reviews here on this site are quite positive and I am sure my views would be different if I worked at some of those departments.

Cons

1) There are people out there who claim that the salary in this company is good. However, I assure you that it is not. This is not my first finance IT company experience and in a longer term, salary here is right about average. (Actually for some departments lower than average) 2) If you are an experience person, your previous experience is halved (i.e. if you have 5 years of experience before, they will count this as 2.5 years). You may think that this is not a bad thing if you get the salary you ask for. However, even if they bait you to joining the company with a high salary, with low raises and late promotions, they will make sure that in the long run, you get your halved experience's worth salary. Which means, in the long run, you will get less than what you would get on most similar companies. 3) Perks of climbing the corporate ladder is quite good. So, there are people who will do anything (ethical or unethical) just to get a promotion or two. This may sound like something nice but I assure you it necessarily isn't so. Upper management's good or bad choices on who to promote to lower management affect nearly everyone. So, in some departments people on average are quite happy with most of what is going on, and in some departments people on average are extremely unhappy. 4) I am ashamed to type this but who you sleep with may be more important than what you do or who you are. Office relationships are not frowned upon. Your success may depend on this. 5) Performance review system does not work at all. In a typical 6 month term, management will praise you for everything you have done for so many times and then at the end of 6 month term, they will give you a bad "grade" and a very bad raise without any explanation at all. If you press for an answer, what you will get will be, "sorry that's what's left". I am not only speaking from personal experience alone but this has been experienced by many people so many times. 6) From upper management's perspective, you are not a human but a machine. Thus, overtime is a culture in this company. Forget your family, friends and social life. The company pays you overtime for up to 40 hours per month. However, even with the overtime paid, your salary is right about average compared to other similar companies. Which means, they aren't giving you more for the overtime, but they are giving you less for the lack of overtime. 7) According to a recent company-wide anonymous survey conducted by a global management consulting firm, this is not one of the better companies you can work at. This is not a personal opinion or a subjective analysis. This sentence is actually putting what's going on around here mildly.

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Pros

Lean deal team size learned a lot

Cons

Below standard street pay for interns

2.0
18 Apr 2026
Recommend
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Pros

BBVA as a whole, it has a very friendly work environment and has a unique culture unlike any other bank in midtown

Cons

That being said, any team or department that lefts unchecked can end up becoming toxic which happened at my team. There was a VP/ED who was mistreating me to a point where it was a violation of the code of conduct and was impacting my overall internship experience and my chances at a full time job because this ed/vp was allowed to mistreat based on personal biases against me. I reported it to our manager during our midterm meeting to which I phrased it as “he was in violation of the code of conduct and has been abusive”. Instead he yelled at me during the meeting because he didn’t want to lose someone who downgraded from a BB that he got for cheap. He said in the end of the meeting he would talk with the Ed/vp but a month later he pulled me into a room with HR and said today was the last day of my internship. Very unprofessional as he clearly sided with the toxic Ed/vp and booted me out because he didn’t want to lose the Ed/vp even if he was in violation of the code of conduct. Horrible experince and everyone in my team failed to uphold to professional decency. As long as everyone in that team is still there would not recommend this team at BBVA unless something structurally changes.

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