The demise of the UK banker bonus cap has sent pay soaring at Barclays and HSBC where the highest-paid bankers have received their biggest payouts since at least 2014.
Analysis of pay documents released this month shows payouts for their most expensive staff surged more than 50% to nearly €20m (£16.6m) last year, after the banks took advantage of looser pay rules and allowed staff to be paid bonuses worth 10 times their salary.
It meant that one HSBC banker was paid between €19m-€20m in 2024, according to HSBC’s annual pay tables for “material risk takers”. That is much higher than a year earlier, when one HSBC employee topped out at €12m-€13m. In contrast, HSBC’s chief executive, Georges Elhedery, was paid £5.4m last year, having taken over in September 2024.
There was a similar jump at Barclays, with the lender having paid €17m-€18m to a single banker in 2024. That is up from a top sum of €11m-€12m in 2023, and is higher than the £10.5m paid to boss CS Venkatakrishnan for 2024.
The pay packages are the highest on record for both banks since UK lenders were forced to start releasing pay data in 2014, with the sum at Barclays last surpassed by a controversial £17m payout to ex-boss Bob Diamond in 2011.
It is one of the first signs that looser regulation has started to feed through to banker pay.
From 2014 to 2023, banker bonuses were limited to two times salary as part of rules introduced after the 2007-8 financial crisis. The hope was that, with less of an individual’s pay riding on performance, there would be fewer incentives for risky behaviour that led to short-term gains.
Salaries ended up rising to compensate for the lower bonuses, but the rules kept a relative lid on total pay: the highest-paid bankers at HSBC and Barclays were paid between €8m-€14m until 2023.
However, critics complained that the cap made it harder for UK-based banks to compete for top talent from countries such as the US, where there was no cap.
The former Tory chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng eventually used post-Brexit rules to call for the banker bonus cap to be scrapped in 2022, with regulators formally repealing it a year later.
Each bank is now allowed to set their own upward limits. Goldman Sachs – which lobbied for the change – has set one of the highest caps, allowing its star performers in the UK to be paid up to 25 times their annual salary.
The number of bankers being paid more than €1m at Barclays jumped from 668 in 2023 to 762 in 2024, although it said nearly half of the increase was due to the effect of currency exchange rates that pushed more staff into higher pay brackets.
At HSBC, 517 of its bankers were paid more than €1m in 2024, up from 512 a year earlier.
Commenting on the decision to scrap the bonus cap for its bankers, HSBC said: “The revised ratio provides HSBC with flexibility to increase variable pay to a small number of employees in frontline roles, subject to the delivery of exceptional performance. “
Barclays declined to comment.
