Yahoo Finance Germany’s largest lender orders managers back to the office four days a week
Deutsche Bank has become the latest big company to crackdown on working from home, ordering managers back to the office four days a week.
The German investment bank, which employs around 6,000 people in London, has told staff they will need to be in the office at least two-thirds of the time. More senior employees will need to be in four days a week.
The new rules, which will come into force in June, will also ban workers from working from home on Friday followed by Monday in an apparent crackdown on employees taking unofficial long weekends.
A spokesman for the financial services giant said: “The bank remains committed to our hybrid working model, which has been received extremely positively by staff.”
It added that its “new guidelines will ensure consistency across the bank and strengthen senior leadership presence in the office, which remains the primary place of work.”
The move follows stricter rules on home working from competitors. Goldman Sachs launched a crackdown on staff not attending the office five days a week last summer, while Bank of America sent “letters of education” to staff in January threatening disciplinary action for those who failed to meet their office attendance requirements.
JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon has said that working from home “doesn’t really work for creativity and spontaneity”.
The Deutsche Bank crackdown came on the day it was revealed that Germany’s financial regulator had threatened the bank with fines for failing to fix problems with its anti-money laundering controls.
It follows long-running concerns over anti-money laundering shortcomings that the bank’s chief executive, Christian Sewing, had pledged to solve after becoming chief executive in 2018.
In 2017, the bank was fined more than £500m by British and American authorities for anti-money laundering issues that allowed wealthy clients to transfer $10bn (£7.9bn) out of Russia in trades that were “highly suggestive” of financial crime.
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the threat of fines, Deutsche Bank acknowledged that improvements to its monitoring systems required by the German regulator, BaFin, had only been “partially completed”.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman said: “BaFin ordered the bank to take specific measures to improve data processing systems for transaction monitoring… We will continue to fully cooperate with BaFin and invest the necessary resources to implement these measures within the deadline.”
BaFin was approached for comment.
