Lloyds' bonuses are not good, with the exception of 5 top people
Lloyds’ investment bank didn’t have a particularly great 2024. Its Q4 and full-year results, released today, show that revenue in the corporate and institutional bank ticked upwards by only 1%. Despite that, bonuses for the bank’s traders were down – or down for most traders, at least.
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Lloyds had 46 investment banking material risk takers (MRTs) in 2024. “Investment banking MRTs” is a regulatory invention that encompasses the most senior and well-paid investment bankers and sales & trading professionals at a firm.
The 46 MRTs had a bonus pool of £12.9m to split between them for 2024. That’s a smaller bonus pool (£13.0m) for more people (38) than in 2023. The average bonus therefore went from £342k ($431k) to £280k ($353k), a decline of 18%.
The decline means that the compensation gap between Lloyds and other top UK banks such as Barclays and HSBC has increased. The average compensation package for an investment banking MRT at Lloyds was $829k in 2024, compared to $1.46m and $1.35m at Barclays and HSBC, respectively.
The decline in bonuses coincided with a slight increase in salaries. That’s pretty surprising, all things considered, as the bank has finally decided to lift its bonus cap from the once-legally mandated 2:1 to a more competitive 8:1 “for 2024 and later years”. Salaries should have gone down; they did not. Presumably the transition will take some time.
Nonetheless, a small group of people at Lloyds were probably pretty happy. The number of people at the firm who earned over €1m (£830k) fell slightly, from 54 to 52, but the number of people earning over €4m more than doubled – from three individuals to eight. Some simple maths suggests that there are five very, very happy people at Lloyds. And a heap of more disappointed ones.
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