Banks don’t want to check your home office, so they force hundreds of employees to come in five days a week

During the pandemic, the brokerage industry regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), suspended workplace inspection regulations to make it easier for banks to allow their employees to work from home. The agency is now set to return to its pre-pandemic requirements for workplace monitoring, meaning some home offices will have to be registered with regulators and remotely inspected at least every three years under a new pilot program.

Now some banks that have been the most flexible with work-from-home policies, including Citigroup, Barclays and HSBC, have decided that complying with the renewed rules is not worth the effort, Bloomberg reports. Between these three banks, thousands of their employees are returning to offices five days a week.

Citigroup said Thursday it is requiring 600 employees who were previously eligible to work from home to come into the office five days a week, although the statement said most employees could still work remotely two days a week depending on the facility . Barclays cited “new regulatory policies” in a Thursday note in explaining why it is returning thousands of investment banking workers around the world to in-person meetings five days a week. Mabel Rius, chief human resources officer for the U.S. and the Americas, told Bloomberg that HSBC’s 530 employees in New York may also soon need to change their remote work habits.

Michael Roberts, HSBC’s CEO for the U.S. and the Americas, told Bloomberg that while the bank will comply with FINRA regulations, he wants employees to want to return to the office.

“We didn’t want to force people back simply by decree,” Roberts told Bloomberg in an interview on Thursday.

Part of encouraging employees to work in person is listening to why employees enjoy coming to the office in the first place. Roberts said the bank included much of those contributions at its new U.S. headquarters in Hudson Yards in New York to “be supportive of people returning.”

“We will comply with FINRA rules, we will make sure that whoever needs to be there five days a week will be here five days a week, but I don’t want to order people to come back,” Roberts said. “I want them to come back because they want to come back.”

Meanwhile, some of the industry’s other giants, including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, have already passed mandates for five days a week of in-person meetings.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, perhaps the most high-profile CEO on Wall Street, has long been critical of remote work. Last year, the bank introduced a mandatory return-to-the-office policy for older employees, and Dimon reported earlier this year that about 60% of the bank’s employees work full-time.

For its part, FINRA disputed the claim that the renewed policy was to blame for banks’ tightening of remote work policies. In Wednesday’s announcement, the regulator stated that some of its regulations are no more stringent than before the pandemic, and have even adapted some rules, including: enabled remote inspections at the workplace. These changes “provide member firms with greater – not less – flexibility to allow eligible enrollees to work from home,” FINRA said.

“FINRA has noted recent statements by firms stating that FINRA’s stringent new rules will require them to return employees to the office full time,” the statement said. “This is incorrect.”

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