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JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs want bankers back in the office five days a week, but one bank CEO says he only took his $4.2 million job on the condition he could work from home
The financial sector – on average – is not a big fan of hybrid working. However, one bank CEO said that the condition for him taking the top job – and a salary of US$4.2 million – was to work From home a few days a week.
Mike Regnier is the CEO of Santander UK, the country’s fifth largest bank, with 19,000 employees on its payroll.
And unlike JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who said that workers who want to work remotely will have to find another role— and Goldman Sachs David Solomon — who called his team back to his tables five days a week—Regnier only allows his team to come into the office twice a week.
Regnier himself said this flexibility was a condition of him taking up the role in 2022, allowing him to maintain his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and travel to central London and across the UK.
Speaking with The Guardian this week, the head of the Spanish bank said he would not have taken the job if he had been required to go to the office every day.
Two years after taking charge, Reigner – who was paid £3.3 million ($4.2 million) to run the organization in 2023—still works from home one or two days a week.
Regnier believes it is not “vital” for him or his team will be present every day of the week to serve the company’s 14 million customers: “If it weren’t for Covid, I wouldn’t have taken this job,” he told The Guardian.
“I wouldn’t want to be away from home five days a week in London. That wouldn’t have been good for the family or me.”
Regnier, a father of two teenagers, said he learned the importance of being there for his family from his own experiences growing up. Regnier’s father, an oil economist, traveled from Surrey to London for work, a journey that takes about an hour and twenty minutes.
“He was an incredible father,” said the 52-year-old bank boss. “One of those people who works hard and feels like that’s the most important thing in life. Then [my father was] not absent, but I probably didn’t see him as much as my kids see me now.
Banking culture
The nature of work within big banks – especially on Wall Street – has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, following the deaths of young operators in the sector.
Last week, Adnan Deumic, a credit portfolio and algorithmic trader at Bank of America based in its London office, fainted due to suspected cardiac arrest playing football at an industry event.
He did not respond to medical treatment, including CPR, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Deumic, originally from Sweden, joined the bank’s global markets team in 2022, after participating in the summer analyst program the previous year.
The story continues
A few weeks earlier, Leo Lukenas III, 35 years olda former Army Special Forces soldier who joined Bank of America as an investment banker the previous summerdied of “acute coronary artery thrombus” – or a blood clot that forms in the blood vessels or arteries of the heart – due to Reuters.
The New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not establish a link between the junior associate’s workload and his death, but the news caused the industry to reflect on its work practices.
Dimon, for example, said that the moment he found out about the death of a colleague, he started a conversation with the company’s head of HR.
According to Business Insider, his priority was to establish “what we know and what we can learn from it.”
For his part, Regnier, whose career spans finance and consultancy, said he learned “the importance of good culture in the banking sector”. Citing his family, friends and exercise as counterweights to his professional life, Regnier and his hybrid work policy may be able to change the course of culture in the banking sector.
This story was originally featured in Fortune.com