Workplaces have long surveilled their employees, from tracking badge swipes to keyboard strokes. Now, JPMorgan Chase is rolling out a program to monitor the hours of its junior investment bankers—and the $782 billion bank says it’s for their own well-being.
As part of JPMorgan’s new pilot plan, it will assess whether the hours claimed by junior bankers on their time sheets match up with the activity electronically recorded by its IT systems, according to recent reporting from the Financial Times. Each week, these employees will be issued reports showing the comparison between their self-reported time and a figure based on their computer footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings. The tools will not be used for evaluation purposes.
“Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness—not enforcement,” JPMorgan said in a statement to the Financial Times. “It’s designed to support transparency, wellbeing, and encourage open conversations about workload.”
While many workers would be anxious at the idea of their employers tracking their days online, the pilot plan is actually an effort to counteract overwork among its junior staffers, according to the reporting. And it’s part of a larger movement among Wall Street titans to try and safeguard employees against potentially dangerous workloads.
Fortune reached out to JPMorgan for comment.
Junior investment bankers were working 100+ hours a week—and one banker even died
Wall Street’s famous “always on” culture of intense, sleepless workdays has started to show cracks as of late.
Much of the issue came to a head just two years ago, when Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret who joined Bank of America as an investment banker, died of a blood clot after working extremely long days at the business.
While the coroner’s report did not establish a connection between the banker’s death and his intense Wall Street workload, his death spurred attention to the long hours and health declines of overworked investment bankers.
That same year, junior bankers were logging 100-hour workweeks—more than double the 40-hour load of many professionals.
Banks are stepping up and helping their junior bankers avoid burnout
JPMorgan’s most recent monitoring tool is only a continuation of the banking industry’s clampdown on the concerning “rite of passage.”
The Wall Street bank started implementing guardrails around the issue a couple of years ago; in 2024, the JPMorgan capped its junior bankers’ working hours to 80 hours a week. This policy was added on top of its “pencils down” period between 6 p.m. Friday to noon on Saturday, and the guarantee that staffers would have one full weekend off every three months. Some cases, like live deals, were exempt from the policy.
Other banks have taken notice of widespread intense burnout.
A 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation found that many junior investment bankers at Bank of America were routinely told by their superiors to lie about how many hours they worked in order to skirt limitations. After the reporting, the bank started encouraging its young staffers to accurately log their hours—and wave the red flag if any bosses told them to do otherwise.
In turn, Bank of America rolled out a new monitoring tool in the fall of 2024, which required U.S.-based junior investment bankers to log their hours daily rather than weekly, the WSJ reported. The young employees were also instructed to input information on the deals they were working on, the senior bankers supervising them, and their ability to shoulder more work on a scale of 1 to 4.
