The financial sector is – on average – not a big fan of hybrid work. However, one bank CEO said the condition for taking the top job – and a $4.2 million salary – was that he work from home a few days a week.
Mike Regnier is the CEO of Santander UK, the fifth largest bank in the country with 19,000 employees on its payroll.
And unlike JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon — who said employees who want to work remotely will have to find other roles — and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon — who has called his staff back to their desks five days a week — Regnier is allowing his staff comes to the office. only twice a week.
Regnier himself said this flexibility was a condition for him to take up the role in 2022, allowing him to keep his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and travel to central London and the UK.
Speak with The guard this week the Spanish lender’s boss said he would not have taken on the role if he had had to go into the office every day.
Two years after coming to power, 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 that it is not “vital” for him or his staff to be present every weekday to serve the company’s 14 million customers: “If it had not been for Covid, I would not have taken this job” , he said. The guard.
“I wouldn’t want to be away from home in London five days a week. That would not have been good for the family and for me.”
Regnier, a father of two teenagers, said he learned from his own experiences growing up how important it is to be present for his family. Regnier’s father, an oil economist, commuted from Surrey to London for work, a journey that takes about an hour and twenty minutes.
“He was a great father,” said the 52-year-old bank manager. “One of those people who works extremely hard and felt that this was the most important thing in life. So [my father was] not absent, but I probably didn’t see as much of him as my children see of me now.
Bank culture
The nature of work within the big banks – especially on Wall Street – has come under scrutiny in recent weeks following the deaths of young traders in the sector.
Last week, Adnan Deumic, a loan portfolio and algorithmic trader for Bank of America based out of his London office, collapsed from suspected cardiac arrest while playing football at an industry event.
He was unresponsive 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 last year.
A few weeks earlier, 35-year-old Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier who joined Bank of America last summer as an investment banker, died of an “acute coronary thrombus” — or a blood clot that forms in the blood vessels or arteries of the heart – per Reuters.
The New York office of the Chief Medical Examiner has not linked the junior employee’s workload to his death, but the news has prompted the industry to reconsider its working practices.
For example, Dimon said that as soon as he heard 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 determine “what we do know and what we can learn from it.”
For his part, Regnier, whose career has spanned finance and consulting, said he has learned “the importance of a good culture in the banking sector.” By citing family, friends and exercise as a counterbalance to work-life, Regnier and his hybrid work policy could potentially shift the culture in the banking industry.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
