Risk ERA Lisbon - Data Scientist BNP Paribas Employee Review

1.0
Nov 22, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good building - WCs are clean - Free coffee - Free fruit

Cons

- Portuguese citizens are treated as 2nd class employees. There is lack of conduct and disrespect towards Portuguese employee. That behaviour is normal in this bank, as Portuguese are often seen as "cheap labour". - Poor IT services. Too much focus on preventing hacking and data leakage and none on providing a good service to the employees. Mails are controlled, skype conversations are reviewed and censored. It is a micro corporate version of a "big brother". BNP is still on the 80's, technology is not even in the dictionary. - Employees are submitted to a "punch card" time approach, in which their time is fully controlled by an IT system. It seems to be a factory instead of a bank. There is no flexibility to work from home any day of the week (even though they allow it in France and the UK). You can work a minimum of 7h per day, but the punch card system will automatically account 1h to be spent working any other day (8h workday is mandatory and fully accounted). - Shady clauses on employees contracts that bypass the Portuguese Labour Code. As an example, you have to compensate the company in case you terminate your contract before reaching 2 years. In addition, they force you to take a training abroad (useless), so you can compensate the company in case you leave during your contract's trial period. If you are unhappy in BNP, they still want to make money with you anyway (they don't care). - Senior management is dumb, unprepared, disorganized, disoriented and too focused on "visibility". They don't care about the feedback provided by employees. There is no project management (at least in Risk ERA Lisbon). There is no innovation, it is only a theory. - This department doesn't stop recruiting in Lisbon ever. They will always find cheaper than you (and me!) anywhere and anytime. The only thing that matters is recruiting cheaper graduates, so the upper management can earn more and more money. - The company claims to be environmentally friendly, just because they don't provide paper coffee cups (it's a scam to reduce costs obviously).

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5.0
May 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

love working here been here 4 years

Cons

return to office policy is tough

1.0
May 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The only good thing about this place were the Nespresso machines.

Cons

I rarely leave reviews, but future job seekers deserve fair warning. From day one, it was clear that micromanagement was a core operating principle here; not a quirk, but a feature. Managers routinely hovered over routine tasks, demanded pointless status updates multiple times a day, constantly changed directives, took credit for my work, and treated experienced professionals like they couldn't be trusted to send an email unsupervised. Any sense of autonomy was purely cosmetic. The culture was equally poisonous. Gossip wasn't background noise; it was practically a department function. Colleagues regularly spoke poorly of one another behind closed doors, cliques formed and hardened fast, and if you weren't part of the right group, you felt it. Unkind doesn't begin to cover it. Basic professionalism and common decency were in short supply. Management set the tone for all of it. Leaders who should have modeled integrity instead participated in the drama, played favorites openly, and addressed conflict with either complete avoidance or outright retaliation. HR was not a resource — it was a shield for bad behavior at the top. I left for my own sanity. The turnover rate here should tell you everything. Life is too short and your career too important to spend either in an environment like this one.

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