Zopa

Cool office, location, people. Zopa used to be such a vibrant, friendly, challenging and exciting place to work. Friday beers, games, weekly town hall events, etc were all cool. HR were great at Zopa, and did a fantastic job.

Modern, cutting edge tech, although it was often executed poorly, it sometimes made for a fulfilling role.

There were times where our technical advice was completely ignored by senior management. The CTO acted like a tech lead, which caused a lot of friction, and led to a lot of expensive decisions being made without adequate thought or planning.

There were other times where I was under a savage amount of pressure to keep the ship afloat, while my team disappeared around me in a very short space of time. Bullying, agro, weak management, in-fighting, awful hiring practices and throwing good money after bad, ultimately led or in my opinion, will lead, to Zopa failing as a business.

One of our senior managers got tickets to a Major Tennis tournament from one of our vendors, two weeks later, we were building two new physical data centers, despite having a full cloud platform. The salary was well below the industry standard, pay and performance reviews weren't taken seriously.

When I left I literally doubled my base salary. I honestly feel that Zopa has spent years of effort, and a fortune of money, where in reality it has done more to develop a banking culture than a Bank.