Pros
Some great people there, really know their stuff when it comes to CLOs. The two senior directors are probably the two best in the London market, superb. They hire well, generally - they won't take someone who doesn't know what they're doing. You can pretty much work from home whenever you want, which was great. Everyone in the office got along, good social bunch. Have some great game changer technology from the guys …
Cons
Ok.....so their main competitor is US bank, who've basically come into the CLO market at rates that are so low, it makes it hard for clients not to say yes to them. They must operate that part of the business at a loss. This means Virtus have had to follow suit and drop their rates too. The profitability as a company at the moment just isn't there, which means bonuses are either non-existent or not great. It also very hard to rise up the ranks, I joined as an analyst with several years experience, was promised AD, but was then told you need to to get to analyst level 3 before you can become AD. This was not mentioned in the contract at all, which was a big gripe of mine. Saying that, it's a fledging company, doing very well in the US....they need more clients and economies of scale to ramp it up to make good money and, as such, pay good bonuses/salaries to the guys who are working damn hard there to make it happen. It was quite long hours, I regularly worked til 9/10/11 at night because they are hugely understaffed at present. I think it will improve, they are aware of it and are working on a solution. Biggest issue for me was the attitude of the US team. US CLOs are far simpler than European, this didn't seem to be understood. There was a really bad relationship between the two teams, some real animosity, which made it difficult as most of the back office work was done by the US team. Not sure how they'll go about resolving this to be honest.
