No more trading in pajamas at JPMorgan Chase.
Top brass at America’s biggest bank by assets have ordered senior staffers in its sales and trading divisions to return to the office on September 21 after six months of working from home, according to a new report.
The bosses delivered the edict on a Wednesday morning conference call and vowed to offer wiggle room for employees dealing with medical or child-care issues, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The call was led by Troy Rohrbaugh and Marc Badrichani, JPMorgan’s respective head of trading and sales, who told senior employees that they’re calling them back for the sake of “camaraderie” and the development of junior staff, the report said.
JPMorgan, along with the rest of Wall Street, sent its workers home in March as the pandemic shuttered New York City. At the time, more than a dozen workers at the bank’s temporary headquarters on Madison Avenue had reportedly come down with the coronavirus.
Wall Street has been fretting ever since about how to best manage the risks of traders dealing in massive amounts of money on sophisticated technology when they work from home.
JPMorgan appears to be the first Wall Street bank to order workers to return to their office, but more banks are expected to follow.
In late August, JPMorgan’s investment banking chief Daniel Pinto told his staff that he would be adopting a rotational approach to keep offices less crowded and safer. That plan, Pinto said, would go on indefinitely. Goldman Sachs announced it would adopt an almost identical approach on Wednesday.



