Pros
Decent benefits(which they've recently begun to cut back on). It's a mellow work culture, your co-workers are quite friendly and helpful in general, it's not a cutthroat environment at all. You will learn a lot at this job, and they do foster development within the constraints they provide. They're incredibly flexible with scheduling and accommodating for sick days etc, which is a huge plus for me.
Cons
This pertains specifically to the Denver site, but is also relevant to the role as a whole; 1) In the FR role you're essentially forced to burnout. The efficiency metrics are high, and when you good at the role you will take 70-100 calls a day. If you haven't done this before, you have no idea how exhausting it can be, people are pissy, impatient and dump their problems in your lap every day. Despite having a Series 7, you will quickly learn you're not really a stock broker, you're a frontline customer serviced rep in a call center. I rarely trade, most of my day is spent playing clean up with banking,tech support or paperwork issues while playing damage control with inconvenienced clients. You will quickly learn how insane people can be, you WILL have a client cussing and irrationally berating you because you can't make their check clear on a Sunday. 2) The career opportunities are narrow, particularly for the Denver site. During training they will tell you that everyone is promoted within 4-5 months, and some promoted out of the training class. This is misleading at best. I'm a top performer in the site and now over a year in role, there are serious issues with favoritism in hiring, I've seen stellar candidates passed over countless times. Even with a promotion, it doesn't change the fact that 90% of jobs are on the phone. It's not easy to be leashed to a phone for 8 hours at a time, there are no projects, or tangible accomplishments, your tasks are often monotonous and dry. 3) There's a massive morale problem in the role, more than half the people I talk to are actively seeking other employment or are despondent and burnt out. If you don't drink the company Kool - Aide 100% (which you never should at any job) you will quickly see a lot of the problems with the business decisions, common practices and client t treatment are frustrating. With this being said, there are people who enjoy the job, and stay in it for years, just be very self aware when you consider the job. 4) For the licenses, you're underpaid compared to the industry. They justify this by giving you a "culture" that is superior. To a degree it's accurate, compared to other phone sites and financial firms, it's pretty decent. 5) Your central metric, upon which bonuses and promotions are centrally focused, are customer surveys, which are graded irrationally and unfairly. You can correlate higher, but it is largely random, and it can be infuriating.