Swift Support Services Malaysia Employee Reviews & Ratings

Salary freeze since 5+ years despite excellent performance year after year. Many experienced people paid well below comparatio 100. Working on your visibility is more important than doing an excellent job. Became too commercial. Old style management. More and more people are demotivated, young and old.

Very political, getting a decision made can take time

Management philosophy and operational structure

No career growth. You would be stuck in a single level for years and years. There is no standard promotion policy. Poor salary increments. Poor bonus percentage. Work life balance basically depends on the team you are in.

As with any organization going through transformation, the changes can be a little unsettling. The workplaces are in real need of updates, but there is a program underway to take care of that.

frequent management changes, limited opportunity for growth, Euro-centric, dead-end technology

Mid management in their mid-50ies: protect each others (zero growth opportunities), affraid of change, give lip service to HQs

Limited promotion chances within the team

- Job functions in Hong Kong is limited - Salary increment is not attractive enough to retain staff (Security Operations) - Early shift: as early as 7am - Team budget is not tight, but not utilized perfectly in a way that benefits the whole team - High turnover rate (resources wasted to train new staffs)

Too many organisational changes in the recent years Niche technology and business knowledge which are hard to be transferred to other companies

1. Middle management sucks. Upper management just listen and believe what middle management says. 2. Middle management delegates all their work to working level staff. Even for those management work, they asks junior guys for assistance 3. From management perspective, working at SWIFT for long time means an expert in security. That’s why there is no improvement even though security team has been set up for few years. 4. Middle management only talks and talks without real deliveries. They emphasis talking and no conclusion coming out after a long time of talk. But upper management likes it! 5. Poor inventory, IAM, log and control mechanism. Middle management doesn’t address it even though junior staff can observe. 6. SWIFT encourages team transfer. But that’s disaster meaning that your senior can be someone without security knowledge.

Company is quite stable so not enough opportunities for career development, too many office politics

- Risk averse in the extreme (almost zero innovation - "old" management is the worst) - No advancement opportunities (so many 30 year senior managers well past their prime) - Dictatorial/micromanaging upper management (raised voices and "my way or the highway" approach is common)

shifts, location, a bit bureaucratic approach

Hardly anything that can be classified as a Con

end of year reviews focus on what you did to justify your job

Too much politics and alot of foreigners who are rude. Not a good place to work.

Some executives are a little challenging to deal with and some middle management are even more difficult, some with bigger egos than needed.

Benefit package is not bad but not great either.

If you are not working for the group where the action is, opportunities are non existent. One group brings in 70% of the revenue, the rest are pretty much treated like baggage.

Nothing I have encountered so far

It's like the management doesn't know in which direction to go anymore. We keep on changing the focus and on reorganising and we, as employees, don't have a say about it. Some operational functions decrease in quality since move to low cost locations. No raise possibility, if you want a raise you need to change jobs, which not only means no one is recognised for improving himself in his job anymore, but it also mean we're losing talented and skilled people in some roles just because they had to change role (therefore often team) to get a promotion. Too many politics. No more real recognition of the work done by employees. Work in silos across departments which ends up in a company that doesn't give itself the means to realise its ambitions

- No room for advancement, someone has to die or move for you to take their spot - Management is not very competant

Growth may not be as quick as you would want.

Messy process. No clear of role and responsibilities. Most of the time you are doing or repeating redundant tasks, and to the extend it is not a sales role anymore. High dependencies on other people/ department to get something done. Low in resources and long turn around time to get one thing done. No proper product training provided. Most of people are clueless and unsure of what to do and who to look for. Too many redundant meetings and required to report yourself to multiple department which is a total waste of time. No marketing department to assist, sales people are required to do everything themselves, from sales to marketing to pre-sales to managing partner to non sales related administrative activities. Completely out of scope. They are not willing to hire the right people to do the right job. No co-operation and support from management from another region even though they know they must co-operate. Worst thing is sales people are not being paid commission thus lack of motivation.

The work environment can be very stressful at times. It's a good idea to manage stress effectively during high volume work periods. Be sure to take advantage of long weekends and vacation days.

Micromanagement, manager are not qualified, laziness, "politics".

Poor middle management - Managers are lack of hands-on skills, and they always just follow what their bosses say.

need to have more fresh hard working people

Not always a lot of room for growth

Once you have 10+ years of experience the only place for advancement is management. The technologies are rather dated and very much risk adverse.

1)Transportation allowance has been fixed since 5 years ago (since SWIFT was first started in KL, 2013) It is a challenge since this country went thru many changes especially tolls, the stability of Ringgit (this point is valid if you see from angle, you were asked to go for business travel, you were given a per-diem allowance. Take that amount and convert Ringgit to EUR..you would feel the differences) :s 2) Flexi-benefit claim - the amount remain the same since 4 years (adding dental & vision allowance). Claim can be done for vitamins, monitors, etc but not laptop/ PC 3) Each department have different styles. If you are in department that is chasing numbers/ target..you might have a team that you need to compete individually instead of working as “a team”. There are ranking displayed which you able to see where you at. People can do whatever they want (ie; work more than 7.5 hours/ stay back) as at the end of the day, numbers and graph matters. Since certain manager chase numbers, it makes people to be individualistic. 4) Don’t have high hope to change how things being done. If things have been decided from the Top (management from HQ/BE), the definition of ‘challenge status quo’ most can’t be applied. Things have been decided, and you have to execute. There are some ‘rigidness’ in this sense. (Generation gap; more gen X, Y in KL than HQ/BE) 5) Make sure your salary is enough before you join. Average yearly increment is in between 4-6 % But this is depends on your skillset, department and yourself. Some might not get at all..particularly this year. 6) Do we have a structured program to groom existing employees in KL to become the next leader/ Manager ? NO. 7) As of now, there is no such thing as employee loyalty/ reward or even acknowledgment in KL. It gives an impression that this is just another company to work in.

Poor senior management, no vision, no desire for taking bold decisions

A little bit slow and bureaucratic - like a government agency, almost.

At SWIFT's U.S. development center, VTC, schedules are usually chosen by management for the developers, and the developers are expected to meet those schedules, no matter how poorly chosen the dates are, so this can mean long hours for employees. The work-life balance under those conditions is poor. The senior local management has been in place for some time, and there are not many opportunities for upward movement. Some in local management are near retirement, but those in the lower management positions, who have the same philosophies about managing, will be moving up into those positions.

The company lost its way while trying to be more of commercial and a profitable company, while it should be managed what it was founded as: a non-profit corporate. That it is supposed to be a non-profit organization is for a good reason so that banks can fully rely on it. If SWIFT becomes too commercial, an entity that can be replaced by a for profit company, then it will be replaced by a for profit company as SWIFT would become irrelevant.

Too political. Top management team just busy politic activities more than doing their tasks. Should change the top management to a more ethic top leader than a less quality leader.

The senior management I have come into direct contact with, although smart, has a frequency to overreact and display harshness towards coworkers and those below him.

there are no cons here

Slow career, limited growth opportunities especially for young hires, average age 40-50s, best positions taken by those who are with company for 20 years

Not a lot of experience. Management is slow in giving meaningful work

Future career path may be limited.

* Almost impossible to grow after a certain point * net salary is quite low * promotions are often too political and you can get stuck pretty easily * old-style manaement, everyone looks at what you are doing * everything is HQ focused, so if youre not there you miss out on most of the "benefits" * extremely hard to get things done, too much levels of approval * inneficient and complicated way to operate

compensation not in line with global finance market too political limited career development options (too small company)

slow to market and heavy top down management

Old fashioned company with a lot of processes, a lot of useless middle-management and very slow.

Politics/Toxic environment Middle managers are not able to manage local workforce. Malaysian workers are not upto HQ/Global standard. Racism are apparent. People are not satistied, always comparing benefits between KL and HQ and ends up in justifying their laziness.

Office politics in KL, unlike management at Belgium

1. Too much hierarchy and hard to break in groups - Some groups are highly unapproachable. 2. Many team members are unapproachable and hesitate to share knowledge, making it very difficult to work. 3. Too many meetings and time sheets. 4. No recognition for hard work. Contractors are given boring and routine tasks. 5. Some team members are highly influential and very difficult to convince with new ideas. 6. There are many groups where team members are around for ages. They hesitate to co-operate and help when inter group co-ordination is involved. 7. Contractors are made to run around asking for details and are not given any priority. They have to be self driven and are excluded from annual reviews and feedbacks. Contractors feel left out in day to day activities. 8. Teams make you feel that you are a contractor at every step. 9. Many projects you work here is not of much use outside, so keep updating your skills on daily basis!

Limited opportunities to employee located in office with limited function like India, Dubai, etc. There is no policy of promotion, you dont get anything until you ask for it. A person with 1 year can get promoted and other with 3 years would stay at the same position , A lot of biasness.