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An occasional Saturday off.
I work in Corporate Banking in a mid tier European Bank. My firm gives me 25 days of annual leave +2 days family care leave (in addition to 12 public holidays) and we are encouraged to utilise all of it. Generally we take 2 continuous weeks of compliance leave but I have seen folks who take 3 continuous weeks if they have leave stacked up for the year. If we aren't able to utilise all our leave for the year, then we get to carry forward 5 days of leave to the next year. I have real vacations where I practically don't look at my work mails for days at a time because my leave cover would take care of any attendant issues that require my attention. In fact during compliance leave we aren't even supposed to respond to any mails officially. At best we can only forward them to our leave cover for them to action on anything urgent. Of course I would return the favour when it would be their turn to take leave. After having worked for European banks for 9 years now, I really cant work in an American bank anymore tbh.
No worries. We use the terms Block leave and compliance leave interchangeably. Block Leave is a period of mandatory 10 days of continuous leave excluding the weekends. Every front office employee is supposed to mandatorily take it every year. During Block leave, an employee is not supposed to login from home or anywhere and is supposed to have no contact with the bank except for personal purposes. The idea is to avoid the employee of taking any decisions that are work related.
This is mainly for security purposes rather than personal purposes and is compliance related. The main idea is that this is done to ensure there are enough checks and balances built in the system to prevent any internal fraud (incidents like these have happened to the tune of billions of dollars in the past). - If the employee is involved in some kind of fraudulent or dubious activities, then the absence of the employee during that time and a team mate handling his share of work would expose the same during the course of 10 working days of absence. This is the reason its also called compliance and is mandatory and every employee needs to take it every year.
Of course all the Banks promote it as the organization wanting the employee to have personal time.