When Deutsche Bank sent senior Wall Street executive Leslie Slover to run its expanding outpost in Jacksonville, Fla., she wasn’t entirely ready for the lifestyle. Gone were the skyscrapers and subways. In their place was a corporate campus with a pond and vast parking lots, flanked by rows of new town houses, some inhabited by employees. The on-site culinary options? A cafeteria and some food trucks. Suddenly, Slover had to relearn to drive. “It’s hard—it’s not Manhattan,” says Slover, 52, who spent her career in the Northeast before becoming the regional head of the bank’s operations in Jacksonville and Cary, N.C. “Indian food at 11:30 at night does not exist.” Transplants from the city that never sleeps may feel at first like aliens in this northern Florida city 35 miles south of the Georgia border, but their numbers are growing. Global financial companies including Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank and Sydney-based Macquarie Group have been moving executives here and hiring locally, even while paring staff elsewhere. It’s part of a Wall Street trend known as nearshoring, in which banks are moving operations away from expensive financial centers like New York to places such as Jacksonville and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Also in Jacksonville are roughly 19,000 employees of Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has established operations in Salt Lake City, and UBS has a site in Nashville. It’s a way to improve profitability without going overseas. Conveniently, it also happens to comport with President Trump’s demands that employers keep good jobs on U.S. soil.

Questions for Discussion 

1. How might financial companies benefit, from a recruitment and selection standpoint, by locating in cities like Jacksonville, Florida, rather than New York City? 

2. What are the advantages of having offices in Jacksonville rather than outsourcing to other countries to lower costs? 

3. What are the advantages of having offices in Jacksonville rather than New York City from a pay and benefits perspective?