Don't Take a Suncorp Graduate Job - the Worst Career Ever

I'm a professional quantitative analyst. I've worked at a number of Australia's major banks, and find my career in finance enjoyable and rewarding. However, the time I spent working at Suncorp as a risk modeller was the most disgusting experience of my professional career. This is a warning for everyone, but especially mathematically or technically competent staff, to avoid Suncorp if you have other options.

Before I quit, I discussed my experience with another member of staff. He said,

"This is the worst place I've ever worked. The way they treat people. Fighting with people to get things done”.

He quit some time after I did. My direct manager (who was a good guy) quit a few months before I did. He said that he couldn’t tolerate how he was being treated.

After I quit, I sent a detailed complaint to Suncorp's most senior management, including the CFO and CEO at the time. I have also made a detailed complaint about Suncorp to the regulator.

Risk Modelling

• Suncorp management have no interest in doing risk modelling. They only want to pretend to do risk modelling to the extent they believe is required to fool the regulator.
• Risk modelling staff are completely undermined and marginalized by technically incompetent, scheming management pushing political agendas.
• The majority of Suncorp's risk models contain very significant mathematical and conceptual errors. Risk modelling staff are prevented by management from fixing these errors.
• Suncorp management believe that the methodology of a risk model is entirely irrelevant; their approach to risk modelling consists of repeatedly changing the estimates and inputs to a model and seeing what number the model gives. This process continues until management get the number they prefer.
• Competent risk modelling staff are viewed as contributing no value to the bank.

People Management

• Suncorp management overrule and undermine staff in the staff members' own area of expertise
• In performance reviews, management invent ridiculous criticisms of staff that strain credulity, to justify not paying them appropriately.
• Management try to cut costs by screwing over their own staff, rather than through effective people management.

TLDR

• Deliberately hired me in on a salary they knew was completely inappropriate for the role. Dramatically below what my predecessor was paid, below the middle on their payband scale despite the role being by far the most complex modelling role in the entire bank.
• Prevented me from fixing critical problems with the bank’s risk calculations. Technically incompetent idiots with political agendas tried to micromanage risk staff making it impossible to get any work done. Mathematically competent staff treated with absolute contempt.
• Knowing that regulatory changes would likely eventually come in rendering this model of reduced significance to the bank, they wanted to avoid giving me a pay increase, despite the fact that I had already worked for a long time on a completely inappropriate salary for the role. Since they didn’t understand non-elementary mathematics or computer code, they began trying to replace me with a spreadsheet they could understand and use themselves. However, they had no clue how to do my job, and this kind of modelling required computer code, so what followed was months of almost nothing getting done while management tried to replace me with a spreadsheet to save themselves a little bit of money.
• After 20 months on a completely inappropriate salary, got a dramatically higher offer from another bank, made a complaint about Suncorp to the regulator, will absolutely never work at Suncorp again for the rest of my career.

Good things about working at Suncorp

• Suncorp is an extremely lax organization. Management are so incompetent it’s often not only unnecessary, but genuinely impossible to get any work done. You can’t turn around at Suncorp without some idiot manager beginning to push an agenda about it, resulting in months-long irreconcilable stalemates. So if you like sitting around doing nothing, and you enjoy fighting with weaselly idiots, this could be the bank for you.
• Can be a way to gain finance experience to use as a spring board into a job at a real bank.

Let me start my review at the beginning.

When I joined Suncorp, I was offered an amount that seemed very low for someone of my skills and abilities. I had come from a maths/coding background, hadn't worked in finance before, and was trying to transition careers. I didn't know the exact nature of the role – it is possible that there could have been a learning curve. The HR woman assured me the performance review was only 6 months away, where it was implied that my salary would be increased. “So I can renegotiate my salary after 6 months?”, I asked. “It’s right there!”, she replied.

The reality was they brought me in to do the most complex financial model in the entire bank on a salary below the middle on their own pay scale, and tens of thousands of dollars below what they paid the last person. I’d say it was at least $20k below what that role should have paid. Now if they were too stupid to understand the complexity of the role they bloody well knew what they paid the last person who did it. Furthermore, it was 6-12 months before they expected regulatory changes to come in which would reduce the significance of the model to the bank. The previous occupant of the role was leaving, and they needed someone to occupy the role for 6 to 12 months until regulatory changes came in and they could discard me like mouldy food.

• Suncorp management try to bring people in on as little as possible, regardless of whether it is remotely appropriate for the role, and don’t care about all the problems that soon creates.

Of course, any intelligent person would realise that someone capable of doing the most complex modelling role in the bank would be capable of contributing a lot of value to the bank beyond that particular model. Especially when you consider that other staff were managing far simpler models on significantly higher pay. But they didn’t seem to be able to make this deduction. They viewed competent risk modelling staff as an unnecessary expense to the bank. And not only unnecessary, but like thorns in their sides. They never had any interest in doing risk modelling - they just want to manage the politics around the risk numbers and create a façade to the regulator, and the last thing they want is risk staff telling them their models are wrong or having to tell APRA that risk staff have found yet another problem with their calculations.

It soon became apparent that not only was there no learning curve, but I was up and running so fast it shocked my predecessor, who had years of previous experience in this kind of modelling. "It took me 4 months to understand what the model was doing!" he told me, after I mastered the model in my first 1-2 weeks and re-wrote the code from scratch in a much more organised form (the existing code was almost impossible to follow). I went on to discover a large number of critical errors in the model methodology that everyone else had missed - even highly paid external consultants.

Risk modelling is a requirement of the financial regulator, which requires that banks hold enough capital to protect themselves against large losses they may experience from things like defaulting on loans, internal fraud, natural disasters, decrease in value of their trading book due to economic crises and so on. The reason why banks are required to do this (and not other kinds of businesses) is because banks hold a huge amount of other people’s money in their deposit accounts, superannuation funds etc. If other organisations go belly up they only lose their own money for the most part. Risk modelling is about using mathematical calculations to come up with reasonable estimates of how much capital the bank should hold to ensure the safety of the public’s money. So it’s about protecting the people’s life savings, and it’s something which should be taken seriously.

Suncorp does not take risk modelling seriously, to put it mildly. Let’s start with the first of many examples. Now, I was doing a kind of risk modelling known as “heavy tailed” risk modelling. This is where we try to estimate the probability of very large, rare losses. Since a bank may not have experienced enough of these events to generate significant empirical data, we often look at external databases where many banks contribute their large losses. Now, while I was refreshing the bank’s calculations with the latest data I realized that they had used the wrong dataset. You know how databases have many files with long names? It’s very important to carefully research what each file represents to ensure you are using the correct one for what you are doing. Of course, I did what any reasonable person would do. I contacted the curators of the database to confirm the correct file to use, and redid the bank’s calculations with the correct data.

The executive manager, SociopathicSoccerMum, was thrilled that I had found and corrected a critical error in the bank’s risk estimation process…. wait, what am I saying - we’re talking about Suncorp here. SociopathicSoccerMum began to panic. I’m not sure whether she didn’t want to have to tell the bank that they’d been a mistake, or she didn’t want to tell the regulator that they’d made a mistake, or she just didn’t want the bank’s capital numbers to change from the number she liked. Whatever the reason, we were immediately pressured into binning this new calculation using the correct dataset. 12 months later we were still using parameters known to have been derived from the wrong dataset. I said to my manager, “at Suncorp, they don’t care about whether the models are correct. They only care about the politics of the numbers.” His reply: “Yes, one hundred percent.”

Now this is a funny example which demonstrates the child-like mentality of Suncorp’s management. I had created a risk report which contained a heat map. This used the colour spectrum to represent risk – red being the most risky and green being the least. When SocioSocm saw this report, she insisted on a change – she wanted the heat map to use only three colours instead of a continuum. Now I thought this was a terrible idea. Three colours does not give sufficient granularity. If two numbers are close to the threshold where it switches from yellow to red, one will be assigned red and one yellow, despite the fact that the numbers might be almost the same. But SocioSocm had been using a certain three colours in something else she was doing and wanted it to match. It was like handing in a maths assignment with all perfect answers only to get a B because the teacher didn’t like the colour scheme.

In another case, there was an error with one of the mathematically complex procedures in the model. I spent over an hour on a conference call with the industry expert, who had validated our model (and who charged a lot of money), until he finally understood that I was right and there was an error in the model. Now your mind will be blown to learn that they actually allowed me to fix this error! I think this might be the only model error I was actually allowed to fix. You’ll understand why this is so surprising as you read the rest of this document and see the way Suncorp management are quite determined to prevent their staff from doing any risk modelling.

Now another manager in the bank, manager Du***ss, became interested in this particular part of the model’s methodology. He started pushing an agenda to have it removed from the model. We had to endure long phone conversations with him as he pushed this agenda. Now this was very strange. Why was manager Du***ss, who wasn’t part of our team, didn’t manage, run or use this model, so concerned with the removal of a particular part of the methodology that he wasn’t qualified to understand anyway? My guess is that he had calculated, erroneously, that this was the main part of the model he didn’t understand. If he could get it removed, he might be able to absorb the model under his own responsibilities in the future and use it to argue for a pay increase for himself. Unfortunately for him, there were many other parts of the methodology he wouldn’t be able to understand either. This, by the way, is par for the course working at Suncorp. The management spend their time pushing their own personal agendas to the point that it becomes impossible to get anything done.

When I joined Suncorp, the model took most of the day to run. This was a big problem, because any time we needed to run the model we had to wait a whole day for the result. Furthermore, when we needed to do sensitivity testing for the model (running the model many times to test how sensitive it is to variation in inputs), it took weeks. By rewriting part of the code in c++ and implementing some clever mathematical tricks to reduce the number of computations required, I got the model run time down to 30 minutes. This increased our efficiency tremendously and meant sensitivity testing could now be completed in a day, instead of taking weeks.

Now, you'll remember that my salary was at least $20,000 below the market. But not to worry, because I could renegotiate my salary after 6 months, right? At the 6 month mark I raised with management that my salary was clearly completely inappropriate for this role. And since we were now at the 6 month mark, it was time for the promised salary adjustment. Their response was that no, my salary would not be adjusted until the 1 year mark at the salary review process. It turns out that the HR representative lied to me when she said the review process was only 6 months away. I had in fact joined about one month after the completion of the last review process, so it was almost a full year until the next one. Of course, businesses don’t have to wait for their annual performance review process – they can review and adjust someone’s salary any time they like.

Now one thing that is important in risk modelling, besides determining the total amount of capital the bank should hold to protect itself from large unexpected losses, is the way this capital is “allocated” to different parts of the business. The idea is that this shows the business where the risk is coming from (in terms of which part of the business and what kind of loss event), so it can put in place controls to mitigate the risk.

At one stage we were contacted by a part of the business who believed their allocation didn’t look right. They thought it seemed way too high given the small size of their business and their limited operations. I investigated and found they were right. There was a problem with the model that was causing their allocation to be dramatically higher than it should have been. There was a quite technical mathematical reason for why this had happened, but I was able to resolve the problem within a day or two.

Now in banking, when you want to make a model change, you can’t just go ahead and make it. You have to prepare a paper about it and present it for approval to a committee. Sometimes the change has to be validated by a separate validation team. This is industry-wide, and is not specific to Suncorp. The idea is that the integrity of the bank’s risk models is of such importance that we can’t risk a single staff member unilaterally making changes to the calculations which might compromise the accuracy of the bank’s risk estimates. Instead, the change has to be vetted and approved by several other key people. I prepared a paper about the issue and the necessary resolution and a committee meeting was set up to evaluate the proposal.

At the committee there were two managers presiding over my proposal, manager ArrogantTwit and our previous friend manager Du***ss. They had been provided with the paper several days before the meeting and given time to read and understand it. Needless to say they didn’t really understand the model, as it was mathematically complex, but nonetheless I believe the paper was pretty simple and clear. "Nah, I don't think we wanna do that" said ArrogantTwit. "No, the model's just being conservative", added manager Du***ss. So if a number is dramatically higher than it should be, that’s good because it just means the model is just being conservative? Oooooooh. Okaaaaay. Good then. I wasn’t sure at the time whether they were really that daft or had some kind of underlying agenda. Models don’t have agendas of conservatism manager Du***ss, only du***ss managers have agendas. This was all they had to say to my proposal. They raised no specific objections to my paper nor asked for any clarification. They simply dismissed it.

Now, there was another manager sitting in on this meeting who we will hear more from later – manager CowardlyLiar. After they dismissed my proposal with a vague comment about conservatism, I replied that it was clearly erroneous that a number was dramatically higher than it should have been. CowardlyLiar immediately said “agreed!”, but they paid him no more attention than they paid me. They just closed the meeting as if they hadn’t heard him. Now CowardlyLiar had worked at Suncorp a long time, and was probably wise to the politics of the bank. As we were walking back from the meeting room he said, “if these regulartory changes weren’t coming in it probably would have passed”. This means that in his opinion, a critical model fix was blocked for political reasons which had nothing to do with the integrity of the risk model.

What I found amazing about this was that these committees, ostensibly put in place to ensure the integrity of the bank’s risk models by providing oversight and review of model changes, were actually being used to obstruct risk modelling staff, frustrate essential model fixes and prioritize management politics over the accuracy of the bank’s risk estimates.

Thus, the bank continued to completely misreport its capital allocations, misleading the bank about where its risk was coming from. “Conservatism” notwithstanding, it’s still very important that the capital amounts be in correct proportion to each other so the bank has an accurate picture of which parts are generating most of the risk. What was particularly funny about this model error was that it involved an actual mathematical asymptote, and could easily cause the bank’s risk to be infinite under certain circumstances. You don’t get any more conservative than that. You'd think they'd be impressed and appreciative that I had discovered that for years, their model had been requiring far more capital as was necessary for that part of the business, wouldn't you? But I never got so much as a thanks for this discovery.

You remember the part of the business that contacted us about its allocation seeming completely wrong? We went back to them and said, “nah, it’s just being conservative”. “What?” “Yeah, the model’s just being conservative you c***s! Now f**k off!” I’m kidding with this last bit. But I’m sure they were left puzzled, wondering why the bank’s risk modelling department seemed to ignore their concerns and accomplish nothing. “I really think the bank erred in not endorsing this fix”, my manager said to me.

Now, the level of stupidity here is off the charts. But if you can believe it, it gets worse. In what followed, Suncorp management actually managed to achieve escape velocity from the world of reason. After ArrogantTwit prevented me from implementing the model fix that would have corrected the erroneous capital allocation of one part of the business, he started pushing his own agenda to have the opposite change made to all the other parts of the business so that all capital allocations would have been dramatically too high, instead of just one. So, subject matter expert submits proposal, manager rejects proposal and starts pushing opposite proposal. What the hell was going on here? Honestly, I’m not sure. We’ve seen previously how SocioPathicSoccerMum prevented us from using the correct dataset because she didn’t want the risk numbers to change. Also, ArrogantTwit’s opposite change involved removing a piece of the methodology that he surely wouldn’t have understood. So the only thing I can suggest is that it was a scheme of his and SociopathicSoccerMum’s either to prevent the numbers from changing, or to make the model more understandable to themselves in order to ultimately replace me with a spreadsheet rather than pay me fairly.

Astonishingly, this “do the opposite of what the expert says” agenda continued for the next 12 months.

Before I go on, I want to give you some background on risk modelling to help you understand what is going on. Feel free to skip over the next few paragraphs if you’re not keen on mathematics.

Suppose you have two sources of risk which you are modelling with normal distributions. It you want to work out the combined diversified risk, it is again a normal distribution with mean given by the sum of the means and standard deviation given by the square root of the sum of the squares of the standard deviations. I’ll refer to this as the “square root rule”. So normal distributions are really easy to work with. Unfortunately, in heavy tailed risk modelling we can’t use normal distributions as they always produce losses not far from the mean. Heavy tailed risk modelling is about estimating rare, enormous losses that are dramatically higher than the mean loss. A fairly standard distribution to use here is a lognormal distribution. Unfortunately, there is no closed form solution (i.e. mathematical formula) for the sum of lognormal distributions. If you have lognormally distributed losses, the only way to calculate the combined diversified risk is to use numerical calculation. Specifically, a kind of simulation known as Monte Carlo simulation. This kind of simulation enjoys wide-spread use in finance, for example in derivative pricing, so this is really no problem. It does mean this kind of modelling must be done using computer code. Again, no problem right? I mean Suncorp is a fairly large organization so why wouldn’t it be using modern technologies like computer code?

I also want to talk a bit about how one goes about fitting these distributions to data. Since heavy-tailed risk modelling is about estimating the probability of very large, uncommon losses, a bank will likely not have experienced enough of these loss events to have enough data to generate a distribution. Instead, the industry tends to supplement internal losses with two things:

• External databases where a large number of banks contribute their loss events. This has the advantage that there is a lot more data, but the potential downside that losses experienced by other banks may be less relevant to the risk profile of your own bank.
• Scenario estimates, where a number of experienced business experts do a thorough analysis of a hypothetical loss scenario and estimate the magnitude and frequency of such an occurrence. For example, one scenario may result in a loss estimate of $10 million, estimated to occur approximately once every 20 years.

Now, let’s say we have a bunch of loss estimates from scenario analysis, and we want to generate a lognormal distribution from this data. If you’ve studied statistics, you’re familiar with the concept of “fitting” a distribution to data, for example using the maximum likelihood method. But it would be a terrible mistake to do this with scenario data. How spread-out the distribution is (i.e. the standard deviation) will be determined by how spread out the scenario estimates are. But this is a random property of how the business experts choose their scenarios, and contains no information about the bank’s risk. If they choose scenarios with similar loss amounts, the standard deviation will be small. If they choose some very small and some very large, it will be large. Furthermore, because small losses are typically far more numerous than large losses in datasets, the small losses will have far more influence on the result than the large ones. In fact, the correct way to parameterize these distributions to use the most extreme losses in the set and not the small or medium sized ones. If it rained a little yesterday, and it rained a little today, you wouldn’t use that to determine the probability of a hurricane tomorrow.

If you do attempt this erroneous approach, an issue that will arise is that the estimates all have different frequencies. Suppose you have scenario estimates of $10 million every 10 years, $20 million every 20 years, and $30 million every 30 years. How do you fit a distribution to this data? Well, if you’re not mathematically competent, you might try to reduce these pairs of numbers to single numbers by converting them all to x in 10 year estimates, by dividing $20 million by 2 and the $30 million by 3. What’s wrong with this? Well, in this case it will result in three losses of $10 million which will result in a distribution with a standard deviation of 0. This will result in a distribution which produces no large, rare losses at all – just giving the mean loss every year.

You can see that risk modelling requires a fair amount of mathematical insight. You can’t just divide this number by that because it seems convenient, and then fit a distribution because you will very likely get numbers that don’t mean anything.

Ok, back to the story. As regulatory changes were coming in that would reduce the significance of this kind of modelling, banks were looking to simply their models. Now, my salary was completely inappropriate. But, they were paying me something, so I decided to simplify the model for them. I guess I hadn’t yet learnt my lesson that trying to do work at Suncorp is futile.

In one morning, I was able to strip out 80% of the mathematical complexity in the model, and not only that, the new simplified model produced essentially exactly the same numbers as the old one. And I had everything done by lunchtime. I began preparing a document about the simplifications to take to the committee. Normally when you simplify a model methodology you would expect the model to produce less accurate, or at the very least somewhat different numbers. So to have a model that was dramatically simpler but produced the same numbers was the best possible outcome. I doubt any other bank in Australia had simplified their model with such incredible speed and such a high quality outcome.

ArrogantTwit was over the moon when he found out – “You f**king legend!”, he said. “I thought it was going to take us 6 months to develop a new, simpler methodology, but you’ve gone and done it before I’ve even had my coffee! Why the f**k are you on such a low salary? I’m gonna get that sorted out before the end of the day”.

Wait…. No.

The document I was preparing to take to the committee meeting next week about my model simplifications was tossed in the trash (figuratively speaking). "I just don't feel it gets us where we want to be", he declared. He asked no questions about what I had done, nor raised any specific criticisms of it. He probably didn’t have much understanding of what I had done since the model was too complex for him to understand. He just dismissed it anyway.

At the committee meeting, he announced his own idea to the business, which he had never run by me despite me being the expert on the subject. His idea was to replace the model with a square-root-rule calculation in a spreadsheet. You’ll recall that I have already explained that the square root rule only works for normal distributions. There was another quant staff member in the meeting who was in a management position. When he announced this idea with expert right there in the room, she looked directly at me as if to say, “what the f**k?” Of course, the reason he didn't mention it to me before the meeting is because he quite deliberately wished to undermine me. After the meeting, I sent him an email explaining that the square root rule only works for normally distributed losses, and as we were modelling heavy-tailed losses, it simply couldn't be used. Heavy tailed losses can only be modelled using simulation which requires computer code - they cannot be calculated using a high school algebra formula in a spreadsheet.

A few weeks later he had come up with a new idea. His new idea was to adjust the losses so they all had the same frequency (number of years). You’ll recall that I already explained that this is absolute nonsense – it can lead to a distribution with a standard deviation of 0. Not knowing how to do risk modelling himself, he had tried to copy another of the bank’s risk calculations. Unfortunately for him, that calculation had also been created by someone who didn’t know how to do risk modelling and was entirely erroneous.

He spent the next THREE MONTHS running in circles like a dog chasing its tail trying to come up with his own model in a spreadsheet. When he finally gave up he said, "I think we'll use your model as the *main* model". I particularly like the use of the word “main”, as if the erroneous nonsense he had produced in a spreadsheet provided some kind of supplementary value to the bank, complementing the real model.

Once we were in a meeting and someone was asking how many months it would take to simplify the model, and whether we had the resources to do it. ArrogantTwit made no mention of the fact that I had completed the work three months ago, in one morning before lunch.

What sort of a manager blocks the team expert from presenting their idea at the committee, and then announces their own idea that they have never run by the expert? At Suncorp, competent people are despised, especially mathematically competent people. They are obstructed and undermined at every opportunity. This is because the d***y, scheming management always have some stupid, unworkable agenda, and competent people are standing in the way of management just by trying to do their jobs correctly. Suncorp is the only bank I have worked at where quantitatively competent staff are treated with absolute contempt. At every other bank I have worked, quant staff have been treated with respect, their work and judgement has been respected, and they are often paid handsomely.

It turned out that their idea of a simplified model was not one that was 100% as accurate but 80% simpler. Their idea of a simplified model was one that they could understand and run themselves, thereby negating the need to pay risk staff fairly or replace them after they quit. Whether the model in any way meaningfully estimated the bank’s risk exposure was a minor consideration. Suncorp management have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the validity of the numbers their models produce. All they care about is whether the number serves their political agendas. For competent people with integrity and standards, this makes working at Suncorp intolerable and harmful to your mental health.

Now, let's come back to my salary. We were now at the one year mark, where performance and salaries are reviewed. Suncorp have a review system where for each attribute you are either failing to meet, meeting, or exceeding expectations. However, it was very obvious that my manager had been strongly discouraged from giving anyone exceeding because management didn't want to have to give anyone a raise. The whole process was entirely dishonest. However, seeing that I was brought in on a salary about $20,000 below the market, had displayed some truly exception abilities in the role, and found countless critical errors in the bank’s risk calculations, you'd think there would be a substantial increase at this point, right? Wrong. Can you guess what actually happened? They gave me NOTHING. Not even a small increase. My direct manager, who was one of the few good people at Suncorp, was so disgusted he used the meeting where we were supposed to discuss the results of the performance review to advise me that my salary was not appropriate, I was paid well below what I was worth, and I should immediately start applying for jobs outside of Suncorp. He quit a few months later himself.

• When a firm’s own management advise their staff to leave you know there is a problem.

After one year working for these bastards on a salary $20,000 below the market, they tried to leave me on that salary for another year. Obviously, there was no way I was going to tolerate this.

I soon decided to raise with management the issue of my completely inappropriate salary. ArrogantTwit dismissed me instantly. "We can't consider salaries until the next annual review process", I was told. Of course you can, ArrogantTwit. You can do anything you want. Why didn’t you fix my inappropriate salary at the most recent performance review then? I immediately went over his head to his manager.

By this time SociopathicSoccerMum had been replaced as executive manager by manager CowardlyLiar. CowardlyLiar claimed to be busy and it was many weeks until he met with me. At the meeting, I pointed out that my salary was far below what other people on the floor were earning in similar (though far less complex) roles. "They came in when we needed someone! We can't bring their salaries down, and we're trying to cut costs!" CowardlyLiar said. I pointed out that my salary was tens of thousands of dollars below the market. "Maybe we can find someone on pay band 3!" he announced (a pay band even lower than mine). I pointed out that I had reduced the model run time from all day to 30 minutes. He shrugged his shoulders. "The bank has to determine what it's willing to pay for your skills and abilities" he said dismissively. He suggested I work really hard for the next year, ask ArrogantTwit for extra work, and maybe I would get an increase at the next performance review one year from now. I told him I would not be doing that as I had already worked for one year on a completely inappropriate salary and been given nothing. "Well, that's not how I've approached my career", he said coldly.

However, he did say he would have HR conduct a review of my salary, because HR maintain industry data about appropriate salaries for different roles, and get back to me soon. Six weeks later, I still hadn't heard from him, so I raised the issue with him again. He admitted that he hadn't bothered to undertake a review. “I’ve discussed this with manager Birdbrain [his boss]. I’ve been advised not to go through the process.” The bank was refusing to conduct such a review, because it was in "cost cutting mode", he alleged. Now I’m highly skeptical this was even true, as a number of new quant staff had appeared recently, doing work that I surely could have done. "In my opinion, your salary is appropriate", he declared, after refusing to take any steps to determine whether my salary was appropriate. “It’s a payband 4 role. I’ve tried to have roles reclassified unsuccessfully in the past.” That’s a pretty lame attempt at a lie, manager CowardlyLiar. My salary was below the middle on your payband 4 payscale despite me having done by far the most complex modelling role in the entire bank. Then he said, "The bank has no appetite for an increase at this time. I realise this isn't going to be satisfactory to you, and if that's the case, you should consider other options". You’d think as you go up the chain in a corporation you eventually find someone who’s in their position because they have enough intelligence to resolve situations like this. But even his boss manager Birdbrain, who reported to the CEO, was as gormless as a stuffed cat.

Management at Suncorp display zero loyalty to their staff and have zero interest in investing in them or developing their careers. If you do ever up working there, don't show them any loyalty, because they will show you absolutely none.

Now here I was, a highly mathematically competent risk modeler being told I wasn’t needed in a risk modelling department. Despite the fact that the management team had no idea how to do risk modelling and most of their models contained many critical errors. Suncorp bank must feature the only risk modelling department in Australia where the ability to actually do risk modelling is not only unnecessary, but not even useful.

What had happened between then and when I joined was that regulatory changes had come in which meant that this particular model was not high on the agenda of management anymore. Of course, they knew on the day they hired me that these regulatory changes were going to come in, so no doubt it was their plan to discard me all along. They could have simply moved me into another role. There were a lot of modelling roles in the bank, and in fact several people in management positions there who had the same background as I did. But then they would have had to give me a pay increase. Why pay me more when they didn't feel they had any immediate need to? I asked CowardlyLiar whether I could be moved into another role, as I had performed phenomenally in this one. He said that if a role became available and was advertised on the internet I could "apply" for it, but he refused to take any proactive action whatsoever.

What thanks did I get for fighting with management trying to make sure Suncorp had correct financial models? Paid at least $20,000 below the market for 18 months and then told to f**k off by these incompetent little weasels because I had already served my purpose. On Suncorp’s Careers website https://clicktime.symantec.com/3vDkSiY6kJ9Ji6SBR565aJ7Vc?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.suncorpgroup.com.au%2Fcareers they write, “We’ll give you the support to develop new skills, and the opportunity to challenge yourself, to become your very best.” That’s interesting, because I was told that they didn’t feel they really needed my role anymore, and wouldn’t move me into another role because they were trying to cut costs, so I should just get lost. They also say, “Immerse yourself in a company where your voice is heard”. My voice was utterly ignored, obstructed and disregarded at every opportunity.

Let me talk a bit more about Suncorp’s approach to risk modelling. Suncorp has a culture of manipulating models to give the numbers that management find most politically convenient. A lot of my time was spent running and rerunning models with different inputs and parameters until management got a number that they liked. If the number was too high, we'd go back and fiddle with the model inputs to get the number down. It was common to get an email from ArrogantTwit asking what number the model gave using certain inputs and assumptions. And this is a key point about Suncorp - when all you care about is that the numbers serve your own political agendas, it doesn't matter whether the model methodology makes any sense. Because you're not really intending to use it. The only thing that matters to you is, can I fiddle with the model inputs until the model gives me the number I want? If so, it’s a satisfactory model. And then what use to you are competent people who know how to do valid financial modelling work? They just get in your way while you’re trying to make up numbers. My direct manager commented how odd it was that they never included me on email chains about the model – the model I was the expert on. Eventually, they seemed to stop assigning me work altogether and just ignore me, so I just sat around doing nothing. Whenever I tried to do some work, idiot managers would start fighting with me so I was literally prevented from getting any work done anyway. They seemed to obstruct and marginalise me quite deliberately. It's also note worthy that they claimed I couldn't be paid fairly because they were trying to “cut costs”, yet they themselves were paid a lot of money to waste tremendous amounts of time.

• They only want to pretend to do risk modelling to the extent they believe is required to fool APRA (the financial regulator).

A couple of months after my salary discussions with CowardlyLiar, he and ArrogantTwit were doing a new risk capital calculation for their superannuation business. I saw immediately that the calculation was nonsense. The calculation was just a random number generator. I won’t tell you exactly what they had done, other than to remind you that I previously gave some examples of how people with only superficial mathematical competence can easily produce meaningless numbers when trying to parameterize a distribution from data. Of course, naively believing that my job was to actually do risk modelling, I immediately raised with them that the calculation didn’t make sense. They seemed to eventually acknowledge the problem. “There’s probably not much data”, said ArrogantTwit. Notice how his first reaction was to try to find a reason to dismiss my objections. We previously discussed how this kind of risk modelling often has to rely on scenario estimates and loss data from other banks, both of which have certain limitations. But there was in fact plenty of data, just with the aforementioned limitations. In any case, the quality of the data was a completely unrelated issue. The problem was that the model methodology made no sense. So if there’s “not much data”, it doesn’t matter that the data is being fed into a calculation that doesn’t make sense? What the hell?

Perhaps they didn’t want to have to explain to their superiors why they had been feeding them incorrect numbers for so long. Perhaps their superiors didn’t want to have to explain to the regulator that they’d been using a nonsense model for so long. Whatever the reason, dumb and dumber just fiddled with their input estimates for a while until the model gave the same number as last year, and off they went to the board. It was clear they just wanted to keep using the same calculation they had always used, and have it give them the same number they had always gotten. It’s not very good for the customers of Suncorp’s superannuation business that they’re not bothering to do proper risk calculations to secure their customers against losing their money.

Soon, it was time for the beginning of the next performance review process. At my performance review, ArrogantTwit, who had spent over a year fighting with me whenever I pointed out that his work was mathematically incorrect, accused me of being "too focused on academic accuracy" - while two highly paid idiots took a fake model and completely made up superannuation risk numbers to the board.

Furthermore, ArrogantTwit accused me of having "poor communication" - after utterly ignoring everything I ever told him. This man, who had fought with me and undermined me at every opportunity refused to admit he had wasted tremendous amounts of time. Instead, preferring to place the blame on me by claiming I had "poor communication". Now, I worked for many years in a teaching and public speaking role, and one thing I was always praised for was my unusually good communication and oratory skills. In fact, after I gave a presentation to a room full of people at Suncorp, another member of staff approached me and commented on how well I spoke.

I wondered whether Suncorp managers were instructed to invent phony criticisms of each staff member to justify why they weren’t getting a raise. Another possibility is that ArrogantTwit misread his job description. He thought he had applied for a role in a satire and his job was to be as silly as possible.

Suncorp management simply don’t have the competence, the intelligence or the integrity required to run a business.

A few months later, after working at Suncorp for 20 months on a salary $20,000 below the market, I got a job at another bank (in Sydney) which came with a 46% pay increase. I was praised for my excellent communication in the job interview.

On the day I quit, ArrogantTwit who had spent 12 months fighting with me because he wanted the model in a spreadsheet - something which wasn't possible - wanted me to hang around for my 4 weeks of notice rewriting the model in a spreadsheet. I told him there was no way I was doing that. I left immediately, foregoing 4 weeks’ notice pay but relieving myself of the psychological damage of having to work with these morons for another 4 weeks.

Perhaps you have arrived at my review because you are thinking of taking a job at Suncorp. What would I say to someone considering a career at Suncorp? I would give them the same advice that Suncorp's own management gave me: "You should consider other options". Take the bank's own advice - consider other options.

Suncorp likes to boast that more than half of its managers are women (https://www.suncorpgroup.com.au/corporate-responsibility/resilient-people-and-communities/diversity-and-inclusion). Sadly, what’s actually important is that your management are competent, not whether they’re women. I also like this page (https://www.suncorpgroup.com.au/news/features/suncorp-international-womens-day) where Suncorp’s female management declare their enthusiasm for fair and equal pay while making ridiculous equality signs with their arms. Now obviously I realise they are talking about fair and equal pay for women, not fair and equal pay for male risk modelling staff. But I don’t see how you can be in favour of fair and equal pay for women without being in favour of fair and equal pay in general.

I'm enjoying my career in finance, but will never work at Suncorp again for the rest of my career. I would make the same recommendation to you.

You can find out more about my experience working at Suncorp at my youtube channel, Suncorp Employee Review:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCocAu3FCcnGFOijIg08Zj0g

Suncorp Employee Review - YouTube Working at Suncorp was the most disgusting experience of my financial career. As soon as I quit, I left a highly negative employee review of Suncorp on Glass...