Terrible culture - Anonymous employee BNP Paribas Employee Review

1.0
Jan 18, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are no real Pros

Cons

Overrun by French in every single country including UK, US, Japan and Australia! Highly inefficient and bureaucratic 100% French management team across every country

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BNP Paribas Response
10y
Thank you for this feedback. As you know our history takes its roots in France but we are now present in 75 countries. We are adapting to this international context by making our top management more diverse. Changes are already happening as 43% of our Senior Managers are now non-French citizens*. The process is still ongoing, but it is already showing results and we highly appreciate our employees’ feedback on the topic. (*End 2014 figures)

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5.0
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Pros

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Cons

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1.0
May 8, 2026
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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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