Vantaggi
The bank has an amazing footprint. If you want to work for a truly global, emerging market institution that can give you exposure to EM + Frontier, this is it. They have deep history in many of these far-flung places and I would think they will never leave. This gives a deeply embedded advantage over other international players and, of course, local competition. I actually feel "here for good" is an excellent representation of this and a wonderful tagline for the company. Long history, through it all, thick and thin. If you stand in Central in HK and look at HSBC and SC buildings side by side (notwithstanding that SC sold its building a long time ago) you see what I mean - HSBC purportedly built its building to be modular so they could dismantle it and ship it out after the handover in '97 if things got hairy. Who knows if this is true or not but the building looks the part. SC building is a veritable fortress by comparison - in other words, "here for good" in living color.
Svantaggi
The bank has an absolutely toxic culture. There has been far too much change at all levels of management. New management come in, excited by all the aforementioned pros and have unreasonable expectations heaped on them and they simply cannot deliver. The result is they fire their directs or themselves get fired (as the blame goes around) and the cycle repeats itself. The bank has to figure out a way to break this cycle. The people that have been around for more than 2 years are inevitably those that are best place to avoid getting caught by this - have either managed to fire and apportion blame or have avoided decisions or rose through the ranks quickly. It's sadly apparent throughout the organization. The functions are mediocre to incompetent and don't know how to support front office. The middle and front of offices are working off of antiquated systems - there has been no investment in improving systems, majority of investment is on regs. The conundrum faced by the institution is that so many areas of the bank need to be literally burnt down and rebuilt, but the cost to do so is so great, that it is simply not possible from the highest stakeholders (shareholders, board) on down. Senior management rolled out a campaign recently, presumably to fulfill it's obligation to "change the culture" called "Our Shared Values." In some ways it is good and necessary but in others it is a sad reflection on the state of the bank. For instance, value #1 is "do the right thing." In my opinion, anyone that is not clear on or doesn't automatically know to do the right thing shouldn't be at the bank to begin with. So does this mean the bank tolerates employees or managers or don't spell out or do the right thing? It's very confusing and illustrates the challenging place that the bank is in.