Bank of America introduces new monitoring software for tracking working hours

Bank of America is implementing an innovative tool for more accurate monitoring of the working hours of its junior investment bankers. This move is part of a broader trend among banks to limit working hours for young employees – a shift occurring only months after the sudden death of a junior employee. The new monitoring tool, expected to take effect next week, requires U.S.-based junior investment bankers to enter their working hours daily rather than weekly into the company’s time-tracking software. Additionally, they must input information about the projects they are working on, the senior bankers supervising them, and their performance on a scale from 1 to 4. “We successfully tested this improved technology platform earlier this year to make our team work more efficiently for our investment banking clients,” a bank spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. However, a statement to Fortune was declined. These changes follow an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, which revealed that BofA employees often ignore bank policies designed to maintain work-life balance. Many junior investment bankers were routinely instructed by their superiors to underreport their actual working hours to circumvent restrictions. Since the investigation, BofA has been encouraging its young employees to report working hours accurately and to report supervisors who prompt them to falsify records. In the industry, junior bankers are typically expected to work around 100 hours per week and have Saturdays off. JP Morgan has implemented similar measures, limiting the working hours for junior bankers to 80 hours per week. This is the first such time restriction for the bank. Previously, JP Morgan introduced a “pencils down” period from Friday 6 PM to Saturday 12 PM and ensured that employees have at least one full weekend off per quarter. Although investment banking initially sounds promising for many young people, it also has a reputation for burning out junior bankers through a culture of overwork. The surge in working hour restrictions followed the death of Leo Lukenas III, a former special forces soldier, who suddenly died of a blood clot in May. Lukenas had been working at BofA for only a year, spending over 100 hours a week on a $2 billion deal. He had already announced in March his intent to leave the bank due to the extreme working hours. The loss sparked a broad discussion about working conditions on Wall Street, known for being strenuous and difficult to reform in the long term. Over a decade ago, BofA had already implemented working hour limits after a 21-year-old intern died in 2013 following 72 hours of work due to seizures. Back then, under the name Bank of America Merrill Lynch, employees were advised to take at least four weekend days off per month. Goldman Sachs introduced similar reforms following the death of the BofA intern, limiting the working hours of its interns to 17 hours per day in 2015. Interns were advised to go home by midnight and not return before 7 AM the next day. The then-CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, emphasized the necessity of having a life outside of work.