US
It’s a sad irony, perhaps, that some of the roles most in demand within Ireland’s financial sector are directly related to salvaging the toxic assets that pulled the country into the current economic mire in the first place.
Financial professionals employed to work out distressed property assets in Ireland have long-been hot property, but those at a manager level are now most in demand.
The Irish Times has suggested that AIB is looking to poach around 20 managers from Anglo Irish Bank’s group recovery management unit to look after elements of its own distressed loan book. As we’ve mentioned previously, Anglo is considered a soft target for these types of roles, which is why it’s continuing to recruit there despite announcing more redundancies group-wide.
Nonetheless, AIB is believed to be offering a 30% salary increase to persuade Anglo staff to make the switch. This may simply be because the bank realises what a valuable commodity manager level staff in this area are currently.
“It’s been very difficult to banks to gain the headcount sign off for manager level hires until recently, because of the expense involved, so a lot of the recruitment was previously at officer level and below,” says one Irish financial services headhunter. “It’s only now they’ve been able to hire, and they’re making up for lost time.”
There are different variations of ‘manager’ level, however. Those who have just been promoted from within are likely to be earning around €65k, suggests recruitment sources, which rises to around €115k for a senior manager.
Let’s not forget, though, that most of these roles will be working on non-NAMA related loans. NAMA itself, if not the teams within the banks, is offering some stiff competition for talent.
The actual number of jobs on offer at NAMA may be a little limited, but the salaries are the most attractive. According to our sources, manager-level roles pay around €120k.
a bit of a merry go round.
Most staff that working in Anglo in this area originally left AIB with nice pay rises to join Anglo back in the hey day now they are being paid surplus to bring them back.
Usual rules, managers looked after while the only working out junior staff do is working out if they will have a job in six months.