Capital One reviews

The biggest problem I have with Capital One as an employer is their pipe-dream vision of a digital transformation that often leads to massive employee layoffs. The most important fact you need to know is that the company's growth story is mostly dead; if you expect to catch a rising tide that will lift your career, I would look elsewhere. Historically speaking, Capital One is successful in only two areas of consumer finance - credit cards and auto lending, but there are very few growth opportunities remaining in these areas. The upmarket card business is overheated and is in an unsustainable rewards arms race that will likely blow up in the next recession (potentially forcing thousands of layoffs or possibly bankrupting the company). Card Partnerships is a break-even venture at best that has seen massive layoffs over the past few years. While Capital One is successful in auto lending, there are virtually no growth opportunities available except perhaps in refinance, but that will likely start a price war with companies with cheaper costs of funds if it continues to expand, which could kill the auto finance business in short order. Capital One completely failed (to the tune of thousands of layoffs) in the mortgage and home equity businesses as well as in the brokerage business. The commercial business is marginally successful at best, and there are no realistic plans to expand internationally beyond their minuscule footprint in the U.K. It seems like the main strategy of upper management is to hope that their "digital" transformation will miraculously change these hard realities, and it's simply not true. I don't mean to be bitter, and there was a time when I believed the half-baked ideas of upper management that they could benefit their customers while still maintaining a sustainable business that didn't consistently hurt employees that made that success possible. I changed my opinion when I saw thousands of people lose their jobs over and over again because of the culture of irresponsible and reckless expansions, which is symptomatic of a toxic corporate culture fueled by an arrogant and dangerous hope that Capital One's "best" people or digital innovation will exempt them from the harsh realities of running a profitable business. Moreover, virtually all of the executive hires (VP+) are ex-management consultants who often pitched these dangerous ideas at their old firms and paid no personal cost for the often disastrous results. Note that a lot of the people who hold high positions with just a bachelor's degree joined when the company was significantly smaller; almost everyone who does that now and doesn't relentlessly play politics (instead of focus on their skills and contributions to the company) gets stuck. I observed that almost all of the promotions happened in the handful of growth areas that still remain at the company, which are becoming smaller and smaller by the day.