I'll chime in on the advisor thing because that was the specific area I worked in.
The man/group I worked for was an excellent advisor who gave honest advice and stood by his word. Individually, himself, I had no problem working for him and enjoyed it actually. If any one wants his name I would gladly give it and if I had enough money, I would probably hold it with him.
That said, the companies themselves definitely have an overall feeling of "CLIENT FIRST!* but not really*). When you have company wide meetings and workshops, it was more about HOW YOU CAN EXPLAIN why this product is a benefit vs WHY this product is a benefit.
And then comes an issue that someone brought up earlier and that is, these front line people really don't make very much base salary. The banks get away with that by giving these types of performance based incentives to people in positions that really have no business selling anything.
The way banks pay their "lower ladder" people is actually what eventually drove me to leave. Not just my personal pay (although, for working in a team managing almost $1b dollars and dealing with the work involved in that, I was definitely not happy with my pay), but that of people that do a whole buttload of work, but it's menial paperwork and stuff so they can really get anyone to do it. But it's still absolutely vital to everything that goes on. Many of those people were immigrants and they had to have TWO JOBS to support a family. No employee at a multi-billion corporation should have to do that IMO. I don't care if you are a teller or the top executive. You spend 40+hours of your week at this company, zero people should need to work anywhere else to lead a very modest standard life.
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