Rob Green - Barclaycard

What attracted you to Barclays?
I think really I was looking for more sports-based jobs, I was looking for a job in a more of an organised sports environment. Through that I came across the Barclays Spaces for Sports Programme and because of that started looking at all different aspects of the Barclays brand.

It seemed to me as a company to be moving forward and growing and doing so in the right sort of way, as well as obviously making quite a lot of money. They seem to have a focus on the customers, not only in terms of the way that they responded to marketing and the way they spent their money but also in terms of the communities, and I think that is really what attracted me.

What does Barclaycard do?
We take customers who have become Barclaycard customers from the point that they join, up until they’ve been a Barclaycard customer for a year. So it’s our job to really make sure that they enjoy their early experiences with Barclaycard, and that, bottom line, we’re a company who have given them good service that they would recommend to a friend.

What have you been doing since you joined?
My role is as marketing manager on the early months on book side, so we deal with the marketing that goes to those customers in the first few months. And we’ve done a variety of different things, we started off with the statements that go to people, the graphics and design of the card carriers and the pins that people get sent when they first open their accounts.

Recently I’ve been moving into some more projects involving possible mobile technology, texting customers and that kind of thing. There's a lot of scope for you to bring your own thoughts and opinions into the work which I like a great deal and I’m having the chance to do that more and more as the time that I’m in the job progresses.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?
I think the thing I like most about my job is the trust that the business shows in you, especially if you have your own idea, they really give you everything you need to run with it and they let you run with it.

You really get to take ownership of a project or of a campaign, and I don’t know that that is necessarily something you’d get anywhere else. You really get to feel that you’re in control of what goes on, and that can be good and it can be bad. If things go wrong you take the blame, but if things go well you get a lot of exposure and people in the business are aware of it.

Why join Barclaycard?
The big selling point certainly of Barclaycard is the exposure you get. You’re expected to come up with fresh and new ways of doing things, with your own ideas and then you’re given everything you need to run with them and that leads to you presenting to the executive committee board with your new ideas and taking credit for everything that goes well with it and that is something that I think certainly for graduates, certainly for me, was very important - the chance to move up the chain quickly.

Whilst some companies may have some formal way of doing it, at Barclays it is just about getting face time with the people who are high up in the business and really seeing your ideas fly. And I think that is something certainly that I looked for and I’m enjoying it a great deal.

Who at work inspires you and why?
The MD of UK cards, he’s a person in a position way above mine, and a lot of the business decisions he’s made have done a great deal of good for the company. To be honest, it’s the personal side of him that I really admire, he’s a very approachable person, very chatty, he’s friendly around the office.

As a new graduate just a few weeks in he’s already come over and chatted to me even though I don’t work directly in his area. Again recently, he invited myself and all of the graduates to a lunch to chat with him about how things are going - just a real personal, personable guy and it’s not just what he does and the business benefits from that but it’s the way he does it that really is, I’d say, inspirational.