As HSBC hands its CEO allowances worth £32,000 a week on top of his £1.2m salary, the High Pay Centre calls on the regulator to investigate bank behaviour.
British banks are now all finding ways round the EU bonus cap by increasing fixed pay. The following is a letter sent by the High Pay Centre to the FCA, calling on the regulator to investigate the causes of excessive pay in the sector.
Dear Mr Wheatley,
The financial services sector has very much been in the lead in recent years in pushing up top pay levels, which other sectors have emulated. We have therefore taken a particular interest in the proposed EU bonus cap on bankers’ pay. The conclusion of a recent discussion that we hosted was that the cap might have an impact at the margins, but a more fundamental look was needed, in particular why such high remuneration was possible in what should be a competitive market.
It is useful to distinguish between wealth creation and wealth extraction. What we want is a financial services sector that helps its clients to generate wealth in the economy at large, and earns appropriate rewards for so doing. What we have, however, is a sector that has become increasingly adept at extracting wealth from its clients through mis-selling, market manipulation and proprietary trading.
Competition is often ineffective in putting downward pressure on charges in key markets. Incentive structures within businesses reward opportunistic behaviour that is deleterious to clients. There is evidence of market failure in both retail and wholesale markets that allows economic rents to be generated and extracted, which are the main source of excessive remuneration within the banks and elsewhere in the sector.
We hope that you see it as a task for the Financial Conduct Authority to bear down on market failure and rent extraction. The FCA’s objectives seem entirely consistent with such an approach. In effectively competitive markets, rents are competed away, to the benefits of consumers in the form of lower transaction costs. Markets that function well, with integrity, attract clients who can take advantage of market efficiency to create wealth, for the general benefit.
The FSA made useful progress in increasing the transparency and efficiency of retail markets through its Retail Distribution Review. We think it would be opportune to instigate a similar initiative in respect of wholesale markets, to see how these are performing against the FCA’s objectives.