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In a sign of things to come in banking and other businesses, Bryn Mawr Trust disclosed that 40 percent of its staff will continue to work from home, the Philadelphia Business Journal (paywall) reported
The company, which has a wealth management office in Greenville and headquarters near its namesake city, will exit some leased office space and sell an office building on the Main Line.
The move won’t lead to the company exiting its Greenville office space, PBJ reported.
Bryn Mawr once had bigger ambitions in Delaware. It operated a bank branch for a time on Concord Pike in north Wilmington. That branch has since been converted to an office for Chase.
Seven years ago, Bryn Mawr made a run at Wilmington-based MidCoast Community Bank but pulled out of the deal after the MidCoast CEO and others were involved in a lending scheme and ended up with jail time. MidCoast has since been acquired by a smaller Pennsylvania bank.
In a regulatory filing, publicly-traded Brwyn Mawr disclosed that 70 percent of its staff worked from home during the lockdown days of the pandemic. It has trimmed its workforce by a couple of dozen.
Bryn Mawr, like other banks, learned a lot about working remotely while handling a flood of Payroll Protection Act applications. While loan officers dealt with long days and nights online systems held up reasonably well around the country.
While Bryn Mawr is one of the first to confirm a shift to working at home, other institutions are likely to follow.
A hybrid model of coming into the office a day or two a week is another option that some nonbankers have employed for years. In the meantime, office space throughout the region is being reconfigured to allow for social distancing.
Barclays, which plans to add 300 or more to a call center operation in Wilmington, plans to reconfigure space, with an eye toward 09 the new reality. That option was part of a $2.5 million grant package fro the state.
The trend of working remotely or “hoteling” (coming in from time to time without your own cubicle) has been building for years. Some companies had pulled back amid worries over productivity and slow. internet connections.
With a host of monitoring systems and higher online speeds in place, such things can be tracked. Working remotely in one form or another is here to stay.
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