Major bank CEO says he only took his $4.2M job on the condition he could work from home

Mike Regnier is the CEO of Santander U.K., the fifth-largest bank in the country with 19,000 staff on its payroll.

And unlike JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon—who said staff who want to work remotely will have to find another role—and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon—who has called his employees back to their desks five days a week—Regnier allows his workers to come to the office just twice a week.

Regnier himself said this flexibility was a condition for his taking on the role in 2022, allowing him to keep his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and travel to central London and around the U.K.

Speaking to the Guardian this week, the boss at the Spanish lender said he wouldn’t have taken on the role if he had been required to go into the office every day.

Two years after taking the reins, Regnier—who was paid £3.3 million ($4.2 million) to run the organization in 2023—still works from home one or two days a week.

Regnier believes it’s not “vital” for him or his staff to be in every weekday to serve the business’s 14 million customers: “Had it not been for COVID, I wouldn’t have accepted this job,” he told the Guardian.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be away from home five days a week in London. That wouldn’t have been good for the family or for me.”

Regnier, a father of two teenagers, said he learned the importance of being present for his family from his own experiences growing up. Regnier’s father, an oil economist, commuted from Surrey to London for work, a journey that takes around an hour and 20 minutes.

“He was an amazing father,” the 52-year-old banking boss said. “One of those people who’s extremely hardworking and felt that was the most important thing in life. So [my father was] not absent, but I probably didn’t see as much of him as my kids see of me now.”

Banking culture

The nature of work inside big banks—particularly on Wall Street—has come under scrutiny in recent weeks following the death of young traders in the industry.

Last week Adnan Deumic, a credit portfolio and algorithmic trader for Bank of America, based out of its London office, collapsed from a suspected cardiac arrest, playing soccer at an industry event.

He failed to respond to medical treatment, including CPR, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Deumic, originally from Sweden, joined the bank’s global markets team in 2022 after participating in the summer analyst program the previous year. 

A matter of weeks before, 35-year-old Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier who joined Bank of America as an investment banker the previous summer, died of “acute coronary artery thrombus”—or a clot that forms in the arteries of the heart—per Reuters.

The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not establish a connection between the junior associate’s workload and his death, but the news has prompted the sector to reflect on its working practices.

Dimon, for example, said the moment he heard about a peer’s death, he began a conversation with the company’s head of HR.

According to Business Insider, his priority was to establish “what we do know and what we can learn from it.”

For his part, Regnier, whose career has spanned finance and consulting, said he has learned “the importance of good culture in the banking sector.” Citing his family, friends, and exercise as counterbalances to work, Regnier and his hybrid-work policy may be able to shift the dial on culture in the banking sector.