Financial institution of America is introducing a brand new instrument to extra carefully monitor the quantity of hours its junior funding bankers work, half of a bigger sample of banks capping work time for younger staff a couple of months after the sudden demise of a junior affiliate.
BofA’s new monitoring instrument, which can reportedly go into impact subsequent week, would require U.S.-based junior funding bankers to log hours each day, relatively than weekly, within the firm’s timekeeping software program, the Wall Road Journal reported. They may even enter details about the offers they’re engaged on, which senior bankers are supervising them, and their skill to tackle extra work, utilizing a scale from 1 to 4.
“We efficiently piloted this improved expertise platform earlier this yr to assist our staff extra effectively serve our funding banking purchasers,” a BofA spokesperson instructed the outlet.
The financial institution didn’t reply to Fortune’s request for remark.
The adjustments got here after a WSJ investigation discovered BofA staff typically flip a blind eye to financial institution insurance policies meant to take care of work-life stability. In line with the outlet, many junior funding bankers at BofA have been routinely instructed by their superiors to lie about what number of hours they labored in an effort to skirt restrictions on working hours. Following the investigation, BofA started encouraging its younger staff to precisely report hours and blow the whistle on managers telling them to do in any other case. In the present day, junior bankers within the trade ought to sometimes work round 100 hours per week and have Saturdays off.
JP Morgan has enacted related limits, capping the quantity of hours junior bankers are allowed to work to 80 per week, the financial institution confirmed to Fortune. The working hours restriction is the primary for the financial institution. JP Morgan has already applied a “pencils down” interval from 6 p.m. Friday to midday Saturday and made strikes to make sure staff have at the least one full weekend off per quarter.
Lasting change
Whereas funding banking has an preliminary shine for some younger folks, all however promising to mint millionaires, it additionally has a status for grinding down junior bankers with a tradition of burnout. The swath of restrictions on work hours comes within the wake of the demise of Leo Lukenas III, a former Military Particular Forces soldier-turned-investment banker who out of the blue died of a blood clot in Might. He labored at BofA for only one yr, and was clocking over 100 hours per week engaged on a $2 billion deal.
Lukenas mentioned in mid-March he meant to go away the financial institution due to its treacherous hours, Douglas Walters, a managing associate at GrayFox Recruitment, instructed Reuters. He labored at BofA for only one yr. BofA’s instruments proscribing working hours have been in improvement previous to Lukenas’s demise.
However the loss nonetheless cracked open a large dialog about Wall Road’s working circumstances, which have lengthy been identified for being arduous—and tough to reform in the long run, given banks’ less-than-successful efforts to crack down on cultures encouraging staff to overwork themselves. BofA applied work limits over a decade in the past following the 2013 demise of a 21-year-old intern who was epileptic and died of seizures following 72 hours of working.
The financial institution, then Financial institution of America Merrill Lynch, beneficial staff take at the least 4 weekend days off per thirty days. Goldman Sachs equally made reforms following the BofA intern’s demise and in 2015 capped its interns’ hours to 17 hours per day, suggesting they be house by midnight and never return to work till 7 a.m. the subsequent day. Goldman Sachs’ then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein mentioned on the time that interns ought to get a life exterior of labor.
“You need to be attention-grabbing, it’s important to have pursuits away from the slender factor of what you do,” Blankfein mentioned. “You need to be anyone who anyone else needs to speak to.”
