Top Citi Banker Says Working From Home Won’t Be the New Normal

(Bloomberg) --

A top Citigroup Inc. banker says he's had more meetings in the past eight weeks than in any six-month period before the pandemic lockdown, but that doesn't mean he expects to work from home forever.

“I call it the ‘interim normal.' I refuse to call it in the new normal,” Leon Kalvaria, chairman of the bank's institutional-clients group, said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We're working our way through this interim normal, and then there will be demand to get back into having human interaction, both flying places and doing meetings.”

Kalvaria and his team of bankers have become more efficient since the outbreak forced them to start working remotely in March, but most of them miss the social interaction they get from the office and face-to-face meetings, he said.

And while banks have started crafting plans for returning workers to the office when the pandemic begins to ebb, many executives are torn about how many employees need to come back at all. Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman has vowed his bank will have much less real estate in the future.

Read what the office might look like when bankers return

Kalvaria said his team has been “incredibly busy,” but the gains come at a cost.

“The days are longer,” he said. “There's no difference between a Monday and a Sunday at this point in time. They all blend together.”

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