My experience with huge corporations is you don’t really need to “know a guy” to get hired a lot of the time - if you do, it’s a professional connection rather

My experience with huge corporations is you don’t really need to “know a guy” to get hired a lot of the time - if you do, it’s a professional connection rather than a family-based one. Similarly you can often make it to the upper echelons at all the places I’ve worked without any kind of family connection - I won’t say “just by working hard” because I’m sure brownnosing and politics are involved, but not family politics. Where I’m from a lot of family businesses/businesses that end up becoming functionally family businesses basically only hire family into upper level positions, which often function more like sinecures. You can argue it’s their right, sure, but I think it’s bad for society. You see it all the time in real estate, local banking and financial services (esp. wealth management), law, logistics or other local blue collar businesses (even medicine - it turns out when you’re an influential local doctor it’s a lot easier to get your kid into the local medical school). That is not to say that family connections are always meritless but I think it’s a big negative of small “family owned businesses” in locking outsiders out of opportunities for social advancement. Regarding bigger banks being better - they can afford to hire really smart people whose work scales over all their customers. They have a much more diverse customer base which reduces risk. Local banks cannot do this as efficiently due to having less customers. I also personally don’t care about the human aspect of my bank at all - they provide financial products which are usually very comparable to those at other banks, and I prefer to do everything online by myself - so I see investments in that area as unnecessary and potentially wasteful (insofar as it impacts rates/terms/etc with poorer margins).