Bank of America is introducing a new tool to more closely monitor the amount of hours its junior investment bankers work, part of a larger pattern of banks capping work time for young employees a few months after the sudden death of a junior associate.
BofA’s new monitoring tool, which will reportedly go into effect next week, will require U.S.-based junior investment bankers to log hours daily, rather than weekly, in the company’s timekeeping software, the Wall Street Journal reported. They will also input information about the deals they are working on, which senior bankers are supervising them, and their ability to take on more work, using a scale from 1 to 4.
“We successfully piloted this improved technology platform earlier this year to help our team more efficiently serve our investment banking clients,” a BofA spokesperson told the outlet.
The bank did not respond to Coins2Day’s request for comment.
The changes came after a WSJ investigation found BofA employees often turn a blind eye to bank policies meant to maintain work-life balance. According to the outlet, many junior investment bankers at BofA were routinely told by their superiors to lie about how many hours they worked in order to skirt restrictions on working hours. Following the investigation, BofA began encouraging its young employees to accurately report hours and blow the whistle on managers telling them to do otherwise. Today, junior bankers in the industry should typically work around 100 hours per week and have Saturdays off.
JP Morgan has enacted similar limits, capping the amount of hours junior bankers are allowed to work to 80 per week, the bank confirmed to Coins2Day. The working hours restriction is the first for the bank. JP Morgan has already implemented a “pencils down” period from 6 p.m. Friday to noon Saturday and made moves to ensure employees have at least one full weekend off per quarter.
Lasting change
While investment banking has an initial shine for some young people, all but promising to mint millionaires, it also has a reputation for grinding down junior bankers with a culture of burnout. The swath of restrictions on work hours comes in the wake of the death of Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier-turned-investment banker who suddenly died of a blood clot in May. He worked at BofA for just one year, and was clocking over 100 hours per week working on a $2 billion deal.
Lukenas said in mid-March he intended to leave the bank because of its treacherous hours, Douglas Walters, a managing partner at GrayFox Recruitment, told Reuters. He worked at BofA for just one year. BofA’s tools restricting working hours were in development prior to Lukenas’s death.
But the loss still cracked open a wide conversation about Wall Street’s working conditions, which have long been known for being arduous—and difficult to reform in the long term, given banks’ less-than-successful efforts to crack down on cultures encouraging employees to overwork themselves. BofA implemented work limits over a decade ago following the 2013 death of a 21-year-old intern who was epileptic and died of seizures following 72 hours of working.
The bank, then Bank of America Merrill Lynch, recommended employees take at least four weekend days off per month. Goldman Sachs similarly made reforms following the BofA intern’s death and in 2015 capped its interns’ hours to 17 hours per day, suggesting they be home by midnight and not return to work until 7 a.m. The next day. Goldman Sachs’ then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at the time that interns should get a life outside of work.
“You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do,” Blankfein said. “You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to.”
