Standard Life

During my three and a half year as a Business Analyst consultant at Standard Life, I learned a lot about the processes in financial systems and the importance of integrating different systems together in order to streamline the processes and provide complete solutions that will be beneficial to various stakeholders from the customer service representative who will respond to members' requests to client sponsors and advisors and eventually to Standard Life members.

I have had the chance to work with different applications such as:
1) The main financial application where members contributions and withdrawals are processed, client statements are generated, withdrawals are calculated, rates are updates, and batch programs are scheduled and ran on periodic basis
2) Member and sponsor site where they can consult their statements, make withdrawals, and sell/purchase stock options  
3)Customer Relationship Management application that is used for responding to customers inquiries, generating reports, and analyzing customers data that will be beneficial for improving customer satisfaction.

The most enjoyable part of the job were the projects on which I was assigned and which were different from one another and which allowed me to learn about different parts of the same application or even different applications. Some projects were about evolving the back-end application and others were about the member and sponsor site which required the solution to add or improve the current user interface to give members new features that will allow them to do it by themselves online such as the purchase and sale of stock options, generate online statement, and submit a list of employees contributions on regular basis.
I also enjoyed the different teams to which I was assigned to as they were very helpful and were open to creative and innovative ideas. There was a strong synergy in all of the teams to which I was part of and we were always able to deliver on time and with quality.

Working for Standard Life was a great experience. Alot of nice people and a growing company.
A typical day for me was to underwriter new residential mortgages to employees that were either purchasing a new home or renovating an existing home. I enjoyed this type of work as it added value to the person that was purchasing the home. They appreciated my efforts. Also I oversaw the daily operations in the department as the supervisor. This also was very challenging. Continuous process improvements were implemented weekly and duplication of effort was elimated.

Standard Life is generally speaking a very good company to work for. In recent years, the company has failed to be very clear on how it implements its strategy. Leadership does not walk the talk. Anyone who applies for a job at Standard Life now should regard employment as a short-term project. It appears that random decisions are made and direction is unclear.

A culture that put the Clients first, quality and care of plan sponsors and members in pension/savings plans was the driver of the business and company. 

The company always looked at was to exceed the clients demand and expectations,. We delivered new products and specialized administration to ensure the members of the group pension/savings plans were administered with excellence.

Standard Life is a company that has a lot of potential growth within its competing industry. As a retirement solutions specialist, I gained a lot of knowledge of pension plans and savings plans in Canada. The high volume of work kept me busy and I enjoyed that. As always, I got a long extremely well with my managers.

very antiquated technology; accomplishments are considered accidental and leadership encourages 'yes' rather than critical thinking. Management seems stuck in the 1970s...

Flexible hours that must be completed before the end of the 2 weeks pay cycle. It requires more discipline from the worker to organize his schedule. Short working hours 7h35 min, make the job very interesting.

I had to work on a project where there was always missing resources. I had to do a lot of overtime. There was no time to do proper analysis or design. Everything was rushed. Looking at the existing code it seemed that this has been the culture of the company for many years.

They found the nastiest people on earth and put them all in one office.  They took the nastiest of the nastiest and made them managers and vps.  Everyone is on antidepressant medication and you will be too if you work there.

I really liked Standard Life in general, but when Manulife bought the company in September 2014, my position abolished.

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