Cetera Financial Group reviews

Cetera suffers from years of being handed off by one private equity firm to another. In their latest past life, prior to the 2016 Bankruptcy, RCAP piled on additional acquisitions to a company already beset with crumbling technology, infrastructure, and offices. In the last 5-10 years the lack of investment in the company as left them in dire straits. To this day their IT department has not been given the resources or attention needed to manage a conglomerate and the firm has been glued together with spreadsheets and pixie dust. To make matters worse, the current management is years behind the competition when it comes to the eventual move from a mom & pop advisor model to the robo allocation model of business. To keep this short...Cetera is like a cab company trying to catch up to Uber and Lyft. The current strategy by the "top" management has not sufficiently addressed the problem and at best is trying to play catch up far too late. In terms of culture, it's mixed between the different departments. Finance and Accounting suffer from a lack of leadership, HR is suffering from turnover, IT is overly dependent on workers in India and contractors to build any real culture. Every single department faces heavy turnover problems...which is why you have probably been contacted by a recruiter and why why you are reading this. They are a recruiters dream becasue turnover is astronomical and moral is abysmal. In summary....do your homework before you go work for a company that will either be bankrupt a second time or sold again within a year.

History: RCAP was a dirty company, cooked the books, bought a bunch of BDs (Cetera being the biggest) filed for bankruptcy, emerged as the new Cetera. With that being said, there's still about about 7 BDs within the "CFG" network. -HORRIBLE communication. Everyone got converted to CFG network and instead for working for 1 BD you work for 7 BDs, meaning reviewing/approving pieces from all 7. No one communicates with the non-Cetera BDs. Everything goes through Cetera BDs and they are the worst. -The worst technology in Compliance ever. To review an advertising piece, they still have their advisers email a person, that person distribute the work, then the analyst re-faxes the document to their record system, DOCUPACE, so much duplicate meaningless administrative work for analysts. It's no wonder they are overworked. All the numbers are inflated because of all the administrative inefficient way of submitting a piece for review. -"We don't favor one BD but we're going to do it the Cetera way", they told us that when they converted us, which is one step forward and 5 steps back on everything...especially technology and internal procedures. -Systems are inadequate, Docupace, Smartworks, HR Connect -Health insurance sucks, when they converted the BDs to the Cetera way, they took out HMO option. So now you pay for PPO and pay more for health costs. -Inadequate structure...like they messed up on our W-2s this year and mailed corrected W-2 in March. Taxes are due in April. Some people have to refile. They can't simply get numbers right. They are off by a few dollars, and forgot to add in FSA amount, and line 12 DD, all the numbers are off... Are they cooking books again?! What kind of company messes up on a W2?! Seriously. This is the first time I ever got a corrected W2 so late in the season. -Slow response for everything. Like simple things like changing your address, or obtaining access to a system. -Unorganized upper management, can't even tell you if you're eligible for bonuses or where you stand in the company. -So many changes (not for the better) for all employees, it won't stop. It keeps coming. Restructuring here and there. Cetera is what LPL was like in the stone ages days. -Morale is not the greatest because they squeeze their employees of everything and expect more work with less pay. -Worst than LPL, if you worked at LPL you'll understand what I mean about this. It makes LPL look like the happiest BD to work for, even WITH all the layoffs.