The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued a statement clarifying that it is not the culprit in Wall Street’s push to get workers and advisors to come back into the office after the pandemic.
While new Finra rules go into effect June 1 requiring firms to provide a list of locations, including home offices, where employers and reps carry out securities-related activities and a permanent pilot program for remote inspections begins July 1, the self regulatory organization said the rules should provide more, not less, remote work flexibility for the broker-dealers and associated persons it regulates.
“FINRA has seen recent statements from firms stating that new, stringent rules from FINRA will require them to bring their workforce back to the office full time. This is incorrect,” the regulator said in a statement. “FINRA's new rules for evolving work models—hybrid and remote—provide member firms greater flexibility for their registered persons to work from home.”
Member firms largely expressed “strong support” for its new rules, according to Finra, which said its staff “had extensive conversations with various stakeholders—including member firms—and factored in comments received by those stakeholders in producing the final rules that were approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
The watchdog said its new rules are intended to provide member firms with greater flexibility to allow eligible registered persons to work from home, following the expiration of temporary Covid-19 relief from existing requirements.
The regulator said it spent more than three years in the rulemaking process before informing broker-dealers in January that pandemic temporary relief would come to an end on May 30, 2024, a year after the official end of the pandemic.
Finra also noted that any location where a firm’s associated person regularly conducts securities business on behalf of a member firm, including a home office, has always been subject to possible disclosure, registration and inspection under Finra rules and those of other regulators.
“I haven’t seen firms feeling pressured to bring people back to work. I’m seeing a lot of people being hired and they’re working remotely. Doesn’t seem that firms are changing what they’re doing in terms of remote work at all,” said Sander Ressler, co-founder and managing director of Essential Edge Compliance Outsourcing Services.
“I think firms are pretty well grounded in having some portion of their home office work remotely and think that will be the case going forward. I think the rules have been out there for quite a while. We’ve debated them and talked about them at conferences, and I think firms are pretty well prepared to implement them,” Ressler said. “I think everyone is prepared to register their branches appropriately. On remote inspector, I think they’re fairly compliant and that there will be a pretty smooth transition overall.”
Some employees and advisors called back into the office, however, have been vocal about their reluctance to leave their home offices.
JP Morgan Jamie Dimon said in a staff memo last April that managing directors should return to the office five days a week and warned other employees working remotely that they should return to the office at least three days each week or face consequences, such as possible “corrective action” and it being held against them in performance reviews, Reuters reported.
JP Morgan employees jumped onto the in-house comment section for Dimon’s memo and criticized how long commutes and coming into the office only to spend most of the day on zoom meetings were a waste of time. The firm shut down comments after 24 hours.
Goldman Sachs first called its workers back into the office five days a week on February 1, 2022, and only 50% of its 10,000 showed up at its New York City headquarters. The firm has issued a number of new return-to-work mandates since then, according to BuildRemote.com.