If you work in financial services, you may have positive sensations about your bonus this year. We already know this from our own bonus expectations survey, conducted in September, which found that 42% of bankers globally were expecting their 2013 bonuses to be larger than their bonuses for 2012.
A little optimism is to be expected. However, a new survey from recruitment firm Astbury Marsden suggests that senior bankers in London are more than a little optimistic: they’re expecting their own particular bonuses to increase by 44% in 2013.
Astbury Marsden conducted its survey in October, suggesting the senior bankers it interviewed were gripped by wishful thinking. – It’s unlikely that bonus pools were finalized that early. However, if managing directors are right and their bonuses are indeed due to increase substantially, it seems very possible that everyone else’s bonus will fall. With the exception of UBS (which is itself hiring new senior bankers and paying them far less), most banks cut the compensation they accrued per head in the first nine months of this year. Someone will suffer. Managing directors clearly think it won’t be them.
Separately, the Evening Standard, has interviewed Elizabeth Corley, the chief executive of Allianz Global Investors who has a sideline in writing gruesome murder stories. Corley’s most recent novel ‘Dead of Winter’ features a teenage girl who disappears in the depths of winter and a serial rapist. She tells the Evening Standard that she writes only at weekends. Corley left the City to write and relax in 2004, but missed ”the people, the industry, the dynamics of it,” and so came back again.
Meanwhile:
Managing directors who moved jobs this year say they received a 29% increase in their salaries. (Bloomberg)
RBC wants to spin out its proprietary trading arm. (Financial Times)
Pay for UK partners at KPMG has risen 23% to £713,000 this year. (BBC)
Credit Suisse is launching Eco Financial Technology, a platform for developing investment banking and hedge fund software. (Financial Times)
Following the case of Isabel Sitz, the banker who sued Oppenheimer Europe for sexism and was helped by recorded conversations of her meetings, banks have been banning employees from recording conversations and accusing those who do of gross misconduct. (The Times)
Sergio Ermotti said the 6-10% leverage ratio required by the Swiss government is completely unrealistic. (Reuters)
Deutsche Bank recruiters have got their Christmas jumpers on. A man has proposed to them. (Facebook)
“Eeally gritty people, who work unbelievably hard, I don’t think they don’t feel the costs, or put a high value on the cost, of working really hard. There’s also the issue of opportunity costs. That really fascinates me. Really gritty people are not constantly worried about what they could be doing instead.” (APA)