Bank of America has told traders they can execute orders from home after an employee backlash over the number of people still working at the bank’s One Bryant Park head office during New York’s escalating coronavirus crisis.
A memo sent to staff in BofA’s global markets division on Monday said traders would be allowed to perform their roles from home from Tuesday, putting the bank on par with peers including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase that already have traders executing orders from home.
The memo, which was sent to people who had expressed an interest in working from home, replaced previous guidance that forbade traders from taking, executing or amending orders at home without “specific management approval”, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.
Insiders say this permission was rarely given, so while some traders could work from home, they had to phone colleagues who were physically either in One Bryant Park or at a disaster recovery centre in Stamford to put through their orders.
Two traders told the FT that this policy put people in harm’s way because a quorum of staff were required to be on the trading floor, even as New York state’s coronavirus cases surpassed 20,000 and many people opted to stay indoors. Staff became more uncomfortable after rumours about a handful of coronavirus cases on the trading floor.
“It’s very difficult for people [to have to come in],” one trader said, adding that there had been “very direct feedback” to business heads and BofA’s human resources department. A second trader said office duty fell heaviest on the more junior staff. “Depending on how senior you are, it’s easier to fight back,” he said.
In a statement to the FT, BofA said it had “allowed trading employees who were in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)’s high-risk category or who made requests for personal reasons to work remotely in recent weeks. These traders were able to view risk and execute their trades through traders in the office.”
The bank said: “After significant testing of remote capabilities and compliance and controls [that] were put in place to accommodate for this unprecedented situation, we are now allowing some employees to expand what they can do from home, including execution of trades.”
In recent weeks regulators including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have temporarily lifted several regulatory hurdles to trading from home to enable financial markets to function during the pandemic.
A second person familiar with the bank’s strategy stressed that traders were already working from home, but that the updated policy would mean fewer of them were in the office by allowing traders at home to execute their own transactions.
Brian Moynihan, BofA chief executive, has walked the trading floor in recent weeks — maintaining social distance from his staff and foregoing handshakes — in solidarity with their efforts, one of the traders said.
BofA also has significant numbers of staff who are working in retail branches and do not have the option to work from home. It is giving those staff a $200 bonus every two weeks, and cutting some of their hours without cutting their pay, to allow for extensive daily cleaning of the branches.