Never recommend for Junior Positions in Investment Teams
Pros
Interesting investment projects in emerging markets.
Cons
- Stress and zero work life balance for junior staff levels (analysts, associate). I will never recommend young professionals to join. I regret personally. The amount of work is too much as there are too many layers of documents required to be submitted to seek approvals from every management for one project due to the bureaucratic nature of the organization). - If you are in local offices, you will be working with people in DC office which means that you are required to work 24/7 given the time differences. - Unreasonable managers (they have zero understanding of how much juniors work.). The culture is very similar to typical investment banks, while the salaries are much lower compared to private-sector banks. - The organization has quarterly targets/budgets for investment amount, hence the constant push/pressure from the management to the investment officers working on the ground to meet the target, sometimes at the expense of their work life balance and relationships with clients. - Too many layers of approval process for investments, which leads to slow decision making which causes a lot of frustration for the clients. It is very common to spend 7 months to 1 year just to make a single loan. This is absurd. - 50-60% of the work is not for value creation for the customers (i.e. investment). Rather, it is more about internal work, mostly creating reporting documents. - Training programs are not easily available for local staffs (most of them are DC-based). - Younger staffs have no idea what these senior management at HQ are doing on a daily basis.
