Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Barclays scraps EU bonus cap for British bankers

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Barclays has become the latest bank to drastically revise a cap on bonuses for its top bankers in Britain, an internal memo seen by Reuters showed on Thursday.

The lender’s senior bankers will now be able to earn payouts of up to 10 times their base salary, up from a two-to-one ratio previously imposed by the European Union back in 2014 when the UK was a member.

“The revised bonus cap will not alter the way Barclays sets its incentive pool, which is based on overall Group performance,” a spokesperson for the bank, who confirmed the contents of the memo, said.

“It will allow us greater flexibility to differentiate individual bonuses within a small and defined group of colleagues,” he added.

Banks including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have already made similar moves to their variable compensation structures for their top UK-based bankers. Barclays shareholders voted in favour of a proposal by the bank to remove the cap at its shareholder meeting this year. The EU originally set the restrictions on pay in an effort to curb excess risk-taking at banks following the 2008 financial crisis. Britain’s financial regulators last October said they would remove the bonus cap, in a bid to increase the competitiveness of the country’s financial sector. (Reporting By Lawrence White, editing by Sinead Cruise)

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