Average pay of top bankers in Europe and the US including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Royal Bank of Scotland’s Stephen Hester dropped by a tenth last year after banks bowed to investor and regulatory pressure, Financial Times research shows.
The fall comes after a wave of high-profile shareholder revolts and a number of legal scandals and fines that have forced banks’ boards on both sides of the Atlantic to rethink executive pay.
The analysis of total pay awarded to the heads of 15 banks, exclusively compiled for the FT by Equilar, a US pay research group, shows that they took home $11.5m on average in 2012, 10 per cent less than in the previous year.