Can you still make money in banking? If Deutsche Bank’s remuneration report is anything to go by, the answer is yes – but only if you’re in the top 6% of earners at your employer.
Deutsche Bank’s figures include all its investment banking staff though, and as we’ve noted before, nearly two thirds of Deutsche’s employees work in infrastructure roles.
If you’re in a front office banking job, figures from Emolument.com, the London-focused pay benchmarking website, suggest you can still make good money – but only if you stick at it.
We took Emolument’s recent data for the evolution of front office banking pay by age, and deducted UK income tax. Net of tax and based upon 2016 compensation levels by seniority, the chart below shows how much you should earn cumulatively if you can stick it out in banking for a decade, a decade and a half, two decades, or two decades and a half.
If you’re in banking to make big money the implication is that you need to hang around long term. The difference in cumulative net pay between a 20 year front office banking career and a 25 year front office banking career is huge. – If you want the big money now, you need to work your way up to managing director (which will take you around 20 years) and to hang on in there for as long as possible. If you drop out after just 10 years, your cumulative net pay will have ‘only’ hit £671k ($967k), a large proportion of which is likely to have been eaten by the high cost of living in London.
It’s a far cry from 35 year-old Geraint Anderson was able to retire aged 35 after just 12 years working in equity research.
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