Recruitment: Compensation calculations

Apples and oranges

One of the key difficulties of moving bankers between banks is that different organizations have completely different ways of paying their staff. “Because [compensation] schemes are so different from bank to bank, the biggest difficulty we have is doing like-for-like calculations on what the value is and how real these schemes actually are,” says a London-based recruiter. This bonus round, the starkest differences were between European and US banks in London. It appears that most US firms carried on paying their top staff exactly as they had before: if a managing director was on a $1 million bonus, $700,000 would be in cash and $300,000 in stock deferred over a couple of years.