Dive Brief:

• The high-power, high-stress firms on Wall Street are beginning to bank on better family leave policies to better retain talent, the Washington Post reported.
• For example, Swiss giant Credit Suisse will now offer 20 weeks of paid leave to “primary caregivers,” making it the longest paid leave benefits program to be offered at a major bank, according to the Post.
• The Post calls Credit Suisse’s move a “reminder of the ripple effect” that the lauded policies offered at Silicon Valley have and will continue to have on Corporate America, particularly as millennials (and soon, Generation Z) make their mark on the workplace.

Dive Insight:

Credit Suisse’s policy covers a nanny and allows for infants to go on business trips. The company will also be adding “parental leave coaches” to help ease the transition in and out of leave time – a strategy suggested by other experts.

But Credit Suisse isn’t alone. Within the last year, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup doubled their “secondary caregiver” benefits to four and two weeks, respectively. Blackstone Group now offers 16 weeks paid maternity leave, and KKR began paying for nannies starting in the summer, the Post said.

"We recognize that our competition for talent is no longer just with financial services firms," Elizabeth Donnelly, Credit Suisse's head of benefits for the Americas, told the Post.

Large financial institutions have not yet followed Silicon Valley in allowing equal paternity or maternity leave, though the Post notes that these firms often find in in their employee data that the secondary caregiver doesn’t necessarily want or require much more leave. But the main obstacle for Wall Street will not be providing the time off – rather, the main problem will be creating a culture that actually allows workers to take the full amount of time.