As we noted yesterday, making big money at RBS isn’t easy. Only 130 people at the government-owned British bank earn more than €1m ($1.1m) a year. Given that there are around 18,000 people working for RBS’s investment bank in total, this means 0.1% of them are earning seven figures. At Barclays, by comparison, 560 people earn more than €1m – 3% of its investment bank employees.
How can you penetrate RBS’s elusive 0.1% group? Fortunately, the bank itself offers some helpful pointers in its 2014 remuneration report. There, it breaks down its high earners in the following passage…
Who earns $1m at RBS:
In other words, high earners at RBS are senior managers, senior traders (especially trader managers), the people tasked with keeping RBS solvent and the people responsible for getting rid of legacy toxic assets. So, who are the high earners at Barclays and HSBC? We don’t know – despite having far more people earning €1m than RBS, neither feels the need to justify their largess in public.