Hedge fund pays over 200% bonuses this year

If investment banks are hiking up salaries to counter regulatory clampdowns on bonus payments, hedge funds are still very much the places to get paid for performance.

A case in point is the UK arm of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group, which has just posted its 2014 accounts on Companies House. It paid out £16.4m in pay for its 63 employees last year – £11.3m of which was in bonus payments.

On an average payment per head basis, this means that employees received £85k in salary and £179.k in bonus payments – or 210% of their base.

In the current era of allowances, salary hikes and clawbacks, such generosity in bonus payments shows the benefit of working for a comparatively small hedge fund.

Fortress’ results are also another example of hedge funds’ recruitment running counter to financial performance. Revenues at the firm for 2014 were £26.3m, down from £31.2m in 2013, but it was recruiting regardless.

It ended 2013 with 55 employees, so hired an additional eight people throughout the course of 2014, or a 14.5% increase. Unfortunately, however, people earned less as Fortress expanded – average pay per head fell from £356.3k in 2013 to £263.4k last year.

by Paul Clarke

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Why you should want to work for Goldman Sachs’ back office

If you work in investment banking operations and still value the prospect of an annual bonus – join Goldman Sachs. Goldman pays twice as much as its nearest rival, BNP Paribas, and nearly seven times as much as the lowest bonuses paid out in the back office at SocGen.

In an era when investment banks are either outsourcing their back office functions (as it the case at SocGen) or shifting the jobs out to lower cost destinations (J.P. Morgan in Bournemouth, Morgan Stanley and Barclays in Glasgow, Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Croydon), it’s all the more surprising that bonuses in operations divisions should hit tens of thousands.

And yet, new figures from salary benchmarking firm Emolument.com suggest that Goldman Sachs paid its UK back office staff an average of £38k for its back office VPs. BNP Paribas, the closest competitor in terms of bonus payments, paid £21k.

Goldman’s total comp for its back office is £125k, ahead of its nearest rivals Nomura (£116k) and Deutsche Bank (£112k). Nomura is second by virtue of its generous salaries – £108k on average. While the range in bonus payments is huge, there’s more parity across the banks when it comes to total compensation. Only SocGen (£71k) lags the pack.

If you want a big bonus and the largest total compensation, work at Goldman Sachs. If you want the security of a more generous salary, go to Nomura, Deutsche Bank or J.P. Morgan.

 

 

APAC Financial Markets • #BackOffice, #BNPParibas, #Bonuses, #DeutscheBank, #GoldmanSachs, #JobSecurity, #JPMorgan, #Nomura, #OperationsDivisions, #Pay, #Remuneration, #SocGen, #SocieteGenerale #MarketNews