Today, Financial News has woken up to the fact that job cuts or pay cuts, or job cuts and pay cuts, are imminent.

It quotes a head of UK investment banking, and a headhunter, predicting 10-15% headcount cuts, and staff eliminations to maintain the bonus pool.

So far, so predictable. However, it’s worth bearing in mind two additional and less foreseen factors, which may make the coming cuts a) deeper and b) sooner than anticipated.

1) New arrivals will be abnormally willing to eliminate people already in situ

Banks have made a number of senior hires this year. Many of those people are on long notice periods and won’t arrive until September/October.

Once they’re there, a combination of falling revenues and the urge to make their presence known is likely to expedite redundancies among existing staff. Think Dixit Joshi, who’s turning up at Deutsche Bank in October, or Can Uran, who’s turning up at UBS at global head of emerging markets FICC in early September.

Equally, there are various senior hires made in earlier in the year who have arrived recently and will want to stamp their authority on a declining market. Think the likes of Steve Ashley and Chris Fleming, who arrived at Nomura at the end of May, or Guy Cornelius, the new head of fixed income at Nomura – who’s arriving this week.

2) Higher salaries mean there’s no point dithering

In the past, redundancies were all about preserving the bonus pool. They were often made at the last possible moment before bonuses were due to be paid. ie, late Q4.

These days, redundancies are still about preserving the bonus pool, but higher salaries are also an issue.

“The cost base has gone up in terms of base salaries,” says Zaheer Ebrahim at Kennedy Associates. “It therefore makes more sense to cut now rather than to wait. We will definitely see redundancies in the third quarter.”

Who’s most susceptible?

As we’ve pointed out previously, UBS, BofA Merrill, Nomura and Morgan Stanley look particularly susceptible to axings. On second thoughts, we’d like to highlight BofA Merrill’s FICC business as a special case.

According to ‘clean’ figures from analysts at Nomura, BofA suffered the worst reduction so far in FICC figures on both a quarterly and annual basis. Its second quarter FICC revenues were down 58% on the quarter and 59% on the year. This looks BAD, particularly for a bank which has been engaged in quite a bit of FICC hiring, some of it reportedly involving generous guarantees.