Over the course of the pandemic, many bankers have been tempted to dream about the possibility of extending their work-from-home regime and turning it into something like a permanent vacation. After all, once the taboo has been broken when it comes to needing to be in the office, and once the compliance problems have been (kind of, sort of) solved, why do you even need to be at home? Why not crunch spreadsheets from a gite in Provence, or a beachside bar in Bali, or polish up PowerPoints from a Greek island?
Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s not quite as simple as that, reports Bloomberg. However virtual and weightless one might feel when working on a laptop and modem, in the eyes of the law you are generally doing the work in the location of your physical body, not your Zoom presence. And that means that even if you don’t have any work permit issues, the local tax man is going to be asking what contribution you plan to be making. Over the course of the coronavirus crisis, this hasn’t necessarily been at the front of anyone’s mind, and some senior bankers have been able to work from their holiday houses, or while staying with family overseas.
If the arrangement is allowed to continue for too long after the lockdowns begin to ease, though, it starts to look less like a temporary expedient and more like a new permanent offshore working model. And since London offices of international banks are not always set up to make payments into the national insurance systems of randomly selected European countries, that is very much something they wish to avoid. For that reason, big banks are currently getting in touch with all the employees who fled at the start of the crisis, and telling them that, while they aren’t necessarily going to be forced to return to the office yet, they need to get back to London. One exception to this trend is UBS, which, possibly having been a little more savvy to tax consequences than the rest of the investment banking industry, never allowed bankers to work from overseas in the first place.
So it looks like the idea of being a nomadic banker might need to be toned down a bit (for Europeans at least). Plenty of banks are still open to the idea of extended remote working after the lockdown, but it will need to be domestic rather than global. But a cottage in the Cairngorms could be just as nice as a chalet in the Alps, and there are surf shacks in Newquay just like the ones in California. And scaling down travel ambitions does at least mean that you’ll be in the same time zone as the office, which apparently matters a lot. After all, Gregg Lemkau of GS, who might have been thought to have been living the dream by running things from his holiday home in Hawaii, did say that although banking from the beach was all right, having to wake up at 3am took a lot of the fun out of it.
Daniel Davies – Read more on efinancialcareers.com
