eFinancialCareers

New York Governor David Paterson estimated that Wall Street bonuses will shrink 20 percent this year, severely denting the state's financial outlook. The 20 percent figure is within the range of estimates released earlier in 2008 by private-sector forecasters such as Johnson Associates. Despite the housing slowdown last year, Wall Street professionals raked in $33.2 billion in bonuses for 2007 - only slightly below 2006's $33.9 billion, according to the... Read more

Freddie Mac Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Syron received nearly $20 million in compensation last year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing comes a week after the government proposed legislation that would make possible a federal bailout of Freddie and Fannie Mae amid liquidity concerns and plunging stock prices. Combined, the two largest government-sponsored mortgage institutions own or guarantee $5.2 trillion of U.S. home... Read more

The Institute of International Finance is recommending Wall Street' securities firms make their pay practices more transparent and tie compensation more to market risk. Earlier this year the group was reported to be drawing up a wide-ranging recommendation to revamp, among other things, the way bonuses are awarded. Its 200-page report claims to establish "best practices" for banking industry compensation. By aligning pay with risk-adjusted performance and adopting the report's... Read more

American Century Investments will restructure its bonus system for portfolio managers. The move will reward the firm's best performers with stock options and tie incentives to long-term performance. The newsletter Fund Action reports the firm is adding a five-year performance component and will measure performance based on a benchmark rather than a peer group, as it currently does. The plan represents one method in which the mutual fund manager is exploring... Read more

Employees of Countrywide Financial may soon be on the receiving end of "take-it-or-leave-it" discussions on new roles as Bank of America begins to absorb the troubled mortgage company. The New York Post says B of A will begin discussing employees' new responsibilities this week, and many senior employees believe they'll be offered "inferior positions with big pay cuts." The idea, the newspaper says, is to "force them to quit and therefore... Read more

Lehman Brothers will award mid-year stock bonuses to its 26,000 employees. The Wall Street Journal describes the award as "essentially a down payment for 2008 compensation." The remainder of the year's compensation will be paid as cash and stock in January, the newspaper reports. The move was seen as an attempt to reward employees while the company faces tough times, and to take advantage of its stock price, which is now... Read more

Citigroup reportedly is reshaping its bonus system to emphasize divisional cooperation and overall corporate performance. "We have to put a premium on partnership-like behaviour," an unnamed Citi executive told the Financial Times. The FT describes the change as a key plank in Chief Executive Vikram Pandit's strategy to revitalize the "universal banking" model by fostering synergies among investment banking, commercial banking and wealth management. Pandit reportedly asked Citi's HR chief to... Read more

If you get a job offer on Wall Street, the compensation may be roughly 20 percent below what you could have commanded a year ago. That's the upshot of a new survey of recruiters released this week by the smart cube, a London-based global research boutique. The survey aimed to pinpoint and quantify how the market downturn is affecting employer and candidate expectations and bargaining power, particularly in terms of compensation. In... Read more

So you think you're underpaid? In a global bonus survey conducted by eFinancialCareers News, 62 percent of securities professionals thought they should have been paid more for their efforts in 2007. The survey was conducted in the days before Bear Stearns was subsumed by JPMorgan and Bradford & Bingley cast a deathly pallor across the British banking sector. Some 938 users of eFinancialCareers sites around the world responded. Only 18.6... Read more

If you think Wall Street was stingy at bonus time last year, brace yourself: 2008 is on track to be far worse, according to a top compensation consultant's latest soundings of its blue-chip client base. Johnson Associates is projecting smaller departmental bonus pools this year across each of the 12 business areas examined in its first-quarter compensation trends report. Company wide average bonuses are seen shrinking between 15 percent and 35... Read more

First the good news for accountants: There are plenty of jobs out there. Now the bad news: Some recruiters say salaries are rising at a slower rate than they have in previous years. Candidates with backgrounds in taxation, auditing and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are commanding premium salaries even as companies grapple with a slowing economy, according to Toronto-based recruiters. Having the designation of Chartered Accountant is an advantage for... Read more

Is the system for calculating bonuses corrupt? Are you overpaid as a result? And would you still do it if you weren’t? Complete our global bonus survey to have your say. Click here to take part.

Though portfolio managers and analysts get most of the attention, the companies they work for couldn't function without the people behind the scenes. In Boston, there's a strong demand for professionals to fill these jobs. Finding candidates, though, isn't always easy. They require specialized sets of skills such as international tax and accounting, notes Alex Cook, head of the asset management practice at Conley & Co. in Boston. "Trying to find... Read more

Office perks like meals sent to one's desk and taxis home are becoming another casualty of the credit crunch. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs recently pulled the plug on reimbursing several types of routine and not-so-routine expenses claimed by employees, the UK's Daily Mail reports. The paper cites a global memo from Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, ordered by Chief Executive Josef Ackermann and first reported in the German news magazine... Read more

Demand for financial advisors is expected to be brisk even as the growth in the overall Canadian job market slows. The need for professionals to help people with their financial and retirement planning is outstripping the supply of candidates. Positions are opening up because of the retirement of Baby Boomers and the general labor shortage, according to Advocis, the Financial Advisors Association of Canada. "Banks are hiring aggressively," says Taylor Train, an... Read more

A candidate's present compensation can hurt their chances if it's too high, but won't help if it's low. So beware of sticking with the same employer over a string of single-digit annual raises which could eventually leave your pay below the market average. That's one message of a Wall Street Journal column that explains how employers decide what to offer and explores what it takes to get an above-average package in... Read more

A new tally indicates the top hedge fund tycoons earned even more in 2007 than indicated by a set of estimates published earlier this month. John Paulson, whose firm achieved spectacular returns by being among the first to bet heavily on the sub-prime collapse, took in $3.7 billion, according to Alpha Magazine's annual ranking of the highest paid fund managers. That figure was a record high. Illustrating the gusher of wealth... Read more

Perceived job security and bonus expectations among U.S. financial services professionals declined during the early months of 2008, an eFinancialCareers survey shows. The proportion of professionals who expect their 2008 bonus will be smaller than last year's nearly doubled between January and March, according to separate surveys of U.S. registered users of eFinancialCareers. In the more recent poll conducted in late March, about as many respondents (23 percent) said they expect... Read more

A new ranking of the highest paid hedge fund leaders bolsters fund proponents' claim that they can profit in good times and bad. Trader Monthly magazine's latest annual top-earners list is headed by five individuals thought to have earned at least $1 billion each last year. While those titans owned their firms, the revenue that hedge funds earn through returns-based incentive fees often is included in compensation formulas for hedge fund... Read more