Since March the futures community has shown its resilience and ability to adapt to the challenges of today. The virtual 36th Annual Futures & Options Expo focuses on shaping what’s next as the cleared derivatives industry continues to move forward and change. Whether by featuring leading voices analyzing the most pressing issues or groundbreaking fintech startups, the expo is the destination to build partnerships, spot trends and define what’s next for the industry.

Special Counsel Petal Walker will participate in a panel titled “The Workplace of the Future: Rethinking How We Work.” Panelists will discuss how, with the onset of the pandemic, financial firms moved from highly concentrated, centrally located office spaces to a distributed model where the majority of staff and management were working from home. Teams, Zoom and other cloud-based applications had all been around for some time but now they were being used at levels never seen before. Regulators stepped up and temporarily eased rules and created exceptions to facilitate the change. Employees set up home offices while juggling myriad of pandemic challenges. Now that we’ve settled into this distributed model, will we ever go back? If not, what are the technological, regulatory and human resource challenges of a distributed office model in a high-tech, highly regulated industry? This panel takes a look at real-world examples and considers whether business will ever be the same again.