As many financial and technology firms remain operating solely on a work-from-home basis, one Salt Lake City, Utah-based fintech has returned to its offices.

AdvisorPeak, a trading and rebalancing solution for financial advisors, reopened its headquarters on Monday, according to CEO and co-founder Damon Deru.

“Yesterday was our first day and it was weird coming back into the office – it was getting more back into the old routine versus the work-from-home routine we had all gotten used to,” said Deru.

Utah allowed some businesses in certain areas to begin reopening in mid-April, and has continued easing restrictions in May.

Nevertheless, Deru said that  things aren’t exactly back to normal in the AdvisorPeak office.

“Even as we reopened, we socially distanced everybody,” said Deru. “We did have all of our developers working together in one big open office, but we’ve taken that and put everyone in their own individual offices.”

Typically, one-third of AdvisorPeak’s workforce operates remotely, said Deru, and even those based in the office normally work one or two days a week from home.

“From our standpoint, it was an easy transition to and from working remotely because we were already set up to work that way,” said Deru. “The technology piece was the easy part – the trickier part as a business owner is replicating the culture and idea-sharing, and keeping communication flowing amongst the team.”

When the economy was shut down, AdvsorPeak’s staff “went into their own world,” said Deru – the work was being finished, but the natural conversations in which camaraderie and innovation can blossom were missing.

Deru’s solution were what have come to be known as virtual water cooler meetings – online video chats among coworkers with no set agenda, where people could speak more openly.

“I hate having meetings, but we solved the culture problem by acknowledging it, and having more meetings,” said Deru. “We basically set up times just to talk.”

During the second quarter of 2020, AdvisorPeak is engaging upon “Operation Rebalance,” where it is offering advisors new to its rebalancing and trading platform access free of charge.

“We looked at it as a way to give back and help educate the market and the industry as well,” said Deru. “It’s free, no-strings-attatched, no contracts, no credit cards access, just come and sign in. We think that once advisors see how easy it is to use tools like ours to calculate their trades, they’re going to be adopters. We feel like rebalancing software is not utilized enough in the industry.”

Deru said that ahead of the outbreak, as many as “50%, 60%, 70%,” of advisors were not using rebalancing tools, “depending on what study you read.”

The realities of working from home during the pandemic make it a natural laboratory for advisors to experiment with new technologies, said Deru.

“It was a good litmus test for advisory firms to root out their inefficiencies, and if there’s a silver lining to all of this, they’re going to come out stronger and better on the other side,” he said. “Advisors are taking advantage of these offers to utilize software at a free and reduced price to help them through this period – we’ve seen record signups over the past two months.

“From a technology standpoint, I would encourage advisors not to be shell-shocked, but to use this as an opportunity to grow and strengthen their processes for the future.”