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Pay for Wall Street bankers is paid on par with colleagues in Asia. Dubai's bankers saw the biggest pay increases in the last bonus round. But London's bankers clearly came out on top.
Top bankers in the UK received compensation increases ranging from 17 percent to 22 percent, according to the latest survey from financial services search firm Napier Scott. In the U.S., the average boost was 10 percent to 15 percent.
By comparison, bankers in Asia received average increases of 20 percent to 25percent, and those in the Middle East saw their pay rise an average of 25 percent to 30 percent.
The differential between pay in the City of London and Wall Street is widest in areas like structured credit. Napier Scott's figures indicate that managing directors working in credit structuring in London's top-tier investment banks earned an average of $4.1 million last year. The comparable figure on Wall Street was $3.1 million. In Asia, it was $2.8 million.
Pay in London increased the fastest for equity derivatives bankers, with managing directors trading earning an average of $2.2 million at tier-one banks.
Shaun Springer, chief executive officer of Napier Scott, says pay in Asia is now on a par with the U.S. in many areas, though the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) still has a long way to go. "Asia and New York are far larger centers than the Middle East," he says. "But anything is possible in time."
Springer says pay is still rising, but not as quickly as before: "We do not see pay increasing in any of the financial centers at anything like the pace it has in the last couple of years."
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