Major Banks Try to Ease Junior Bankers' Exhaustion

Two leading investment banks are taking steps to prevent junior bankers from working more than 100 hours a week following complaints of overwork. JPMorgan is instituting an 80-hour weekly cap for junior bankers in a first-of-its-kind move for the bank, while Bank of America, which already flags work beyond a 100-hour weekly limit, is unveiling a new timekeeping tool to more closely track bankers' time in the office, per the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. As part of an investigation published last month, the Journal found junior bankers at Bank of America were instructed to conceal when they exceeded the weekly limit on working hours, even though their schedules proved "hazardous to their health."

Bank of America will now adopt daily timekeeping, rather than weekly, and prompt bankers to record details about their work and which senior bankers are overseeing it. Junior staff can also "gauge how much capacity they have for more work on a scale from 1 to 4," per the Journal. "Part of the idea is to spot who's busiest and who else has capacity, spreading assignments," Bloomberg reports. Sources say BofA's new reporting tool was in development before the May 2 death of Leo Lukenas, a 35-year-old associate who'd been working 100-hour weeks for a month as part of the $2 billion acquisition of Heartland Finance by UMB Bank, per the Journal. His death, attributed to a blood clot, brought renewed scrutiny of bankers' grueling workloads.

JPMorgan's new 80-hour weekly cap—equivalent to working 11 hours a day, seven days a week—matches the New York state limit on hours of medical residents. However, junior bankers will be able to exceed the limit in certain cases—for example, while working on a live deal. It's unclear, therefore, whether junior bankers will be prevented from working "120 hours a week or more in the thick of a time-sensitive project," as they've been known to do, per the Journal. Other banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, don't have limits on bankers' working hours, notes Business Insider. (More overwork stories.)