With COVID-19 lockdown measures across the world forcing staff to work from home, many companies are now questioning the traditional working from an office business model. One of these companies is Virtu Financial, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the firm said today.

In New York, the CEO of Virtu Financial, a large trading and market making firm, Doug Cifu, said that the company is looking at alternatives to having all of its employees work from an office once lockdown measures ease, according to a report from Reuters.

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Virtu CEO: working from home is cost-effective

As a result of the pandemic, out of Virtu’s one thousand employees, approximately 95 per cent were working from home when the company reported earnings in early May. Following on from this, the company is now rethinking its physical offices, Cifu said via webcast at an industry conference held by Piper Sandler.

In the webinar, Cifu said: “I think every firm is struggling with that. I mean, I know for sure that our costs for real estate are going to go down precipitously, because I’m not going to pay for 80,000 square feet in downtown Manhattan when I don’t have to.”

The CEO of Virtu is part of a larger trend, with many within the fintech space, as well as other industries, looking at making remote working a more permanent option for their staff, or at least, allow more flexibility than the standard working from an office.

The perception has changed

As Finance Magnates previously analysed, although studies had shown that employees are on average more productive when working from home, employers had largely been reluctant to make the change – motivated by fear of losing revenue.

However, the coronavirus pandemic took that choice out of employers hands, showing that it is possible for their staff to work from home and still remain productive.

Indeed, the “perception has changed,” David Mansell, co-founder and director of NEM Ventures, told Finance Magnates in a previous interview. “Individuals have realized that those at home are not idly watching Netflix–one friend outside of the blockchain space has told me he has ‘never worked so hard in his life.’”