US banks weigh options about staff as economy reopens

With tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Square announcing that a large portion of its employees will work from home permanently, the US banking industry is deciding whether to follow the trend of keeping its employees remote, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, has almost 200,000 employees currently working remotely. According to Bloomberg News, the company found that its traders managed about three times the typical trading volume while working from home, making it possible that a large percentage of employees may remain permanent remote workers to save costs on leasing office space.

However, Bank of America's CEO Brian Moynihan believes the customers will still prefer "to conduct business face to face." According to Moynihan on an interview with NPR, 875,000 people came into Bank of America's 4,300 branches on a single business day that week. The company previously faced backlash for not allowing certain positions such as traders to work from home, the

Financial Times reported. But by the end of March, Moynihan said that Bank of America had sent about 90,000 laptops to its employees in the USfor remote working. The company had not revealed whether workers will stay remote in the future, though Moynihan said the company had hired 2,000 employees in March, and also had committed publicly to not laying off any of its 200,000 workers in 2020.

Another option one of the largest US banks is considering is moving out of hotspots for the pandemic, such as denselypacked cities. Citigroup is currently researching options of opening satellite offices in the suburbs outside of New York City, Bloomberg News reported. The bank is in preliminary discussions regarding office leases on Long Island, Westchester and suburbs in New Jersey.

Wells Fargo informed employees in early May that the work-from-home scenario would likely last through the end of June. The company has about 200,000 employees working remotely, with 65,000 still reporting physically to jobs at bank branches or operation centers.

Truist Financial Corp currently has 70% of employees working from home and is developing an approach to return to normal operations in its branches and offices, according to a spokesperson.

Capital One plans to keep its employees working from home until Sept. 7, and employees will receive six weeks' notice before an office location re-opens for employees.

The spread of Covid19 and the public health measures taken to contain it have led to a dramatic drop in economic activity around the world.

Many countries, including the UK, introduced social distancing. Schools and workplaces were closed, travel restricted and people instructed to stay at home.

In the UK, about one in five companies report that they have temporarily closed or paused trading. Close to one in four have seen their turnover halve. Payments data suggest household spending is down by around a quarter.

Official estimates suggest that UK economic output contracted by almost 6% in March as lockdown measures were introduced. It is likely to have fallen considerably further in April as those measures remained in place.

As activity has fallen in the UK, the number of people in work has dropped sharply.