Bank of America targets a longstanding Wall Street tradition in its latest effort to address junior banker burnout

• Bank of America is reinventing the role of the investment banking “staffer.”
• Staffers are traditionally midlevel employees tasked with doling out jobs to junior bankers.
• BofA is elevating the role by making it permanent and giving it to higher ranking staff.

Bank of America is shaking up a long-standing investment banking tradition in its latest effort to prevent young bankers from burnout, Business Insider has learned.

On Wall Street, the job of doling out tasks to entry-level bankers has traditionally rested with a handful of midlevel bankers widely referred to as “staffers.” A criticism of the staffer role is that the midlevel bankers assigned to the job have little incentive or power to protect young bankers who might be overworked.

Bank of America is now giving the responsibility for junior banker workloads exclusively to members of its highest ranks: directors and above, according to a person with knowledge of the switch. The role will also be permanent. (Traditionally, the staffer role is filled by senior associates or vice presidents on a rotating basis.)

“The change here is that they will no longer have anything but this job,” the person said. “Before you were doing two things, and now your role is to oversee the teams and to provide guidance and all that comes with that.”

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the change on Monday. It comes less than a year after a Bank of America associate died following his team’s closing of a $2 billion deal, igniting a series of initatives geared toward protecting junior bankers from overwork.

At Bank of America, “staffers” are given the title CRO for chief resource officer, this person said.

In the past, bankers were designated to the CRO role temporarily — handling staffing for managing directors in need of a team to close a deal. By making the role permanent and filling it with senior leaders, the hope is that the incentive will shift from getting a deal done to building the next generation of talent, the BofA insider said.

“By working with these teams day in and day out, they’ll have a better sense of leadership strengths, they’ll have a better sense of work assignments, they’ll have a better sense of developmental opportunities — how do you get this person to the next level?” this person said.

The new CROs will be under the leadership of Andrew Karp, a Bank of America veteran and head of sustainable banking solutions, according to the person familiar.

“These are senior bankers who either have raised their hand and say that this is something I would like to do or have been tapped to do it,” this person added.

In May, Bank of America associate Leo Lukenas died of what was determined to be acute coronary artery thrombus, which causes blood to clot in the heart. His death sparked a series of reports about 100-plus hour workweeks by current and former BofA bankers, as well as concerns, first reported by BI, about the bank’s tool for flagging excessive work hours.

Bank of America in September said it would implement a new time-tracking tool. Around the same time, JPMorgan promised to cap hours at 80 per week, unless bankers were on live deals, and created a new junior banker protector role.