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Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe says a wage cap on those who work in State-owned financial institutions could be leading to problems with staff retention.
Currently, those who work in top jobs in AIB and PTSB can’t be paid more than €500,000 a year.
With a large number of international banks now located in Ireland, it’s worried that staff at Irish-owned banks could be attracted by more lucrative job offers.
The Department of Finance is therefore looking to review how much bankers are paid, but we’re wondering: Does the €500,000 salary cap for bankers need to be reconsidered?
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500k is plenty maybe even too much, if the companies go to private ownership then pay then what ever you like. It our tax money and that’s just way to much pay for any public role.
@Dave.: so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems and make less money for the bank or worse and then the tax payer have to help the bank more all because you think 500k too much but ends up paying tax payer more classic short sighted view
@Dave.: so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems and make less money for the bank or worse and then the tax payer have to help the bank more all because you think 500k too much but ends up paying tax payer more classic short sighted view
@Dave.: so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems and make less money for the bank or worse and then the tax payer have to help the bank more all because you think 500k too much but ends up paying tax payer more classic short sighted view
@Dave.: so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems and make less money for the bank or worse and then the tax payer have to help the bank more all because you think 500k too much but ends up paying tax payer more classic short sighted view
@Dave.: so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems and make less money for the bank or worse and then the tax payer have to help the bank more all because you think 500k too much but ends up paying tax payer more classic short sighted view
@Dave.: It’s a fair cop.
The argument made is typically “we can’t attract top international talent at these rates, when execs can get paid more elsewhere”
The counter argument is “you are not a top international bank, your market share is already dominant and doesn’t move much, your market has historically low levels of switching with people banking from primary school savings accounts up to retirement”.
I doubt these are ‘hard’ banking jobs, and there seems to be a steady influx of non-CEO execs willing to come and run our pillar banks for a few years to build their credentials. So they move on, someone else ambitious will take the job title and think about the bigger picture for their future.
As for staff retention issues, I haven’t seen a significant ATM, point of sale failure, or any issues with my bank pretty much since the crash. The EBA is keeping our banks honest with stress tests, and the Central Bank is doing a good job with macroprudential rules to prevent these execs from shouting lend, lend, lend like your bonus depends on it!
@JesusMoreBullshit: well they didn’t do a great job last time dis they.
@Dave.: even if these companies go into private ownership there should still be controls. If banks suffer or collapse its always taxpayers pay regardless. As banking is so important for economies to work then it must be controlled to with in an inch of its life.
@Dave.: Industrial Enterprise generates wealth and profits. On teh other hand, Banks have a license to lend public money for profit but they mostly print virtual money, which is then transubstantiated into actual wealth by people borrowing it and paying back in real money (From Industrial Enterprise) plus interest. Once Banks don’t get too greedy with excessive loan to income ration, they just can’t fail but that’s precisely what these idiots do. Automate the role and send them packing.
@JesusMoreBullshit: more money doesn’t equate to better people. Look what happened last time. 500K is plenty. Give them performance or target based bonuses. But make it so the bonuses are earned. This deal of giving bonuses out when the company is losing money or underperforming is pants!!
@JesusMoreBullshit: says the fake twitter account 5 times
@Dave.:
It’s not our tax money. They are being paid by the bank. Also, we only own some of the banks and we want to sell the interest we have in the near future.
I’ve no problem with the concept of salary caps, as long as every country does it. If we do it unilaterally, we are only harming ourselves.
@JesusMoreBullshit: “so it’s our tax money so you rather pay less and attract some person for the top job who potentially could cause more problems” This from January or have you forgotten? https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/aib-chief-admits-bank-benefited-by-up-to-100m-from-tracker-scandal-1.3366113
@JesusMoreBullshit:
Emmmm, the TOP Guys sank our economy
To ask a very ignorant but genuinely curious question – what exactly do bankers do to justify a salary of €500K plus bonuses?
@Rachel: bankrupt the country.
@Rachel: When it works for them, they try to make as much as possible off our backs….when they fail….we still pay…its a win win for them and a FU to us
@Skeptical: It would be a high pressured job and you’d be responsible to shareholders and answerable to the public. But this is Ireland your neither here. The money is fine for the role. There would be alot of senior board members in banks so the pressure wouldn’t be there for the CEO.
This guys want private style salaries with the handy number of the public service. No thanks, want higher pay go private.
@Rachel: gamble with money that’s not their own safe in the knowledge if it all goes wrong the taxpayer gets suckered with the bill.
@Rachel: who is more valuable, a Premiership footballer, a pop star, all earn more than 500k pa or a banker who actually does have to work hard and has huge responsibilities both the bank, its shareholders and staff
@Kevin50: I know what I get with a pop star or footballer.. they also ‘work hard’ …if they feck up, we don’t pay them millions…my kids would not have to bail them out.. but with bankers, it’s take take and more take…question, if you want to reply…do you or a member work in a bank?
@Kevin50: Nonsense. Professional sports people and music artists have to work their assess off, make huge sacrifices and give up the best years of their life while under massive public scrutiny.
@Kevin50: it’s hard to justify paying a person with taxpayers money while they make decisions that are not in the taxpayers’ interest and to their benefit …. vulture fund sales with performing loans included, higher interest rates to public over other European banks, shut down of cash flow to viable businesses in times when needed. Is it not a bit insulting to go the taxpayer for a rise?
@Dan: and that’s harder than it looks. There was a lot of effort put into f#$king it up!!
@Kevin50: I love how you talk about bankers responsibilities to the bank, its shareholders and staff but nothing about responsibilities to the general public.
Did paying them massive salaries avert the crisis and crash? No. They were centrally involved.
Why should bankers be paid way more than top medical consultants who’ve trained for 10 or 12 years?
Even the dog on the street knows that it is a given they will be getting raises, this is merely a softening up exercise to get us used to the idea
.
Sure, with the banks not payong any taxes foe the next 20 years, what else are they going to spend their billions in profit on?
@Pixie McMullen:
Only a Fine Gael man could have sympathy here. The same bankers who’ve been screwing the Irish people over for years with inflated interest rates well above the EU base rate.
@Tweed Cap: The inflated interest rate is a result of previous poor policy on giving out narrow margin tracker mortgages, and a decision we have made as a society to eschew international norms and make it near impossible to foreclose on a house, with tens of thousands of ‘homeowners’ impossibly in 6 months to years of arrears.
While I’d rather pay less, and I think it’s better for both parties to repossess hopeless cases, I’m pretty comfortable with tracker mortgages being honoured, some level of protection from foreclosure as a necessary evil.
Banks are necessary to fund everything from our basic requirements to our lifestyle aspirations.
@Rónán O’Suilleabháin: Not a popular one, Ro
@Rónán O’Suilleabháin:
Will a higher paid Mgmt Team at a Plc Bank bring in more biz to grow revenues, profits and share price?
The answer is: unlikely!
There is ongoing massive disruption in banking sector to online model and crypto currency innovation, so requirements now for tough CEOs to fillet out bloated costs such as Rents, Sals (ie chop all over €150k pa), Perks, etc, to meet challenges ahead.
Decentralize the HQs out of Dublin to the regions, for starters.
Government needs to introduce policies to free up office space and residential capacity from Dublin, and banking is a sector that shouldn’t be too discommoded, given level of sovereign ownership, innovations with cloud and wider bb capabilities.(in some rural locations)
Leo needs to start thinking outside the…Pale!
@Joe Phillips: I don’t come here for plaudits. If I did, I’d have left back in the good old days of red thumbs. I come to challenge bar stool soundbites and to bring a sprinkle of realism to populist ideas and notions.
We should have let them all fail and opened up a national bank for the people.
@Sean Conway: And what would the ‘people’ have put in this National Bank for the People. Buttons ? Because it’s all they’d have left after they’d lost their savings when the other banks failed. Suppose the ‘people’ could have borrowed from this new national bank to get themselves started again ? Nope. The bank would have to borrow the billions needed for working capital and no financial institution in its right mind would risk lending into a state which would let its banks fail on a whim. The consequences would have been multiple times worse than what actually happened after the crash. We’d have been left completely wiped out with zero chance of anyone bailing us out. Think of the worst case scenario you can imagine. It would probably be worse than that !!
@Sean Conway: Currently, they are all nationally controlled, with the exception of BoI.
It is within the power of the state to dictate mortgage rates, but they have not.
It is within state power to clear out boards which do not follow national objectives, but they do not.
In fact, the state does not impose national objectives, other than mortgage restrictions, & this top gun salary limit. Banks charge what they like, pay no taxes, & despite leaving us all with a huge national debt, they want to get back to their golden pay days.
But then the people vote in the Govt., so you get what you vote for, even if it deprives others of reasonable standards of life.
The bank’s management should have been gutted when we bought them. 200k salary cap seems fair and if they don’t like it they can work for a bank not owned by the state
@Hellenize Dublin: to be fair that’s what they’re doing
Bankers and politicians, the two groups who done the most damage to the country and also the two groups that give themselves the biggest pay rises!
I have no problem with them earning above the €500k threshold or more once the banks have paid back the tax payers and are no longer state owned .
These bankers are the politicians friends. This is simply an exercise to justify letting bankers cream off a more obscene salary.
Seems to me that they are already being paid too much money for playing around and taking risk with other people’s money with little or no accountability.
Vultures and hyenas.. if nurses and teachers struggle to pay rent and buy houses, so should these b’stds..
@Bart Teeling: That’s a great point, those doing hard jobs are the ones who are left to struggle while bankers who make fortunes are just happy to rob their customers just to make a few extra quid. Nurse, teachers, ambulance staff, Garda etc are the ones who should be getting pay increases not these vermin.
Yes, dramatically slashed for their incompetence.
Ffs here we go!, either the government & banks are distracting us from something else coming down the line, or they are going to just implement the pay rises anyway and this is to soften us up!
I’ll be livid if they get a rise, the government need to just tell them to F off!!!!
We have all been told the “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys” excuse previously when it came to bankers pay. Previously they were paid extremely handsome salaries and benefits among the top earners in the country / world. Look what happened? These over paid monkeys destroyed the financial system with their inept management and nearly brought the country down with them. We are still paying off their gambling debts while they getting gilt edged pensions and salaries elsewhere. Its time to get real on corporate pay. If 500k per annum is not enough for them tough, let em go.
@Ro Molloy: Well said Ro.
Throwing people on streets and FFG putting out feelers to return to boom time.
Remember Leo, Not one more cent…
FFG are truly pathetic..
If you can’t manage to live on 500K a year you probably shouldn’t be running a bank in the first place.
If we can’t afford to raise the minimum wage how do you justify €500+?
If they can afford pay rises and wanting to pay bonouses,they must pay their taxes mr Noonan let them off paying for 20 years.
I know that you have been inconvenienced and am prepared to compensate you, shall we saw 1 million american dollars? …Very well 2!
These so called geniuses salary might be capped at 500k but how about expenses and their gold plated pension, probably another 500k
If I’m a qualified person, capable of running a bank and I can get a salary outside of Ireland more than the one I can get IN Ireland I know where I’m going.
The issue here isn’t really the salary it’s WHO is given the job. You WANT someone worth the money, it’s who’s doing the hiring and their inability to pick the person that won’t run an organisation in a way that will be detrimental to the country that is the real problem.
We don’t have confidence that the people DOING the hiring have a clue what they’re doing.
I want someone worth the salary. But I don’t trust the people doing the hiring not to be influenced by cronyism and praise. Frankly I don’t think they know what is needed to run this type of organisation.
@Tricia G: “The issue here isn’t really the salary it’s WHO is given the job. You WANT someone worth the money, it’s who’s doing the hiring and their inability to pick the person that won’t run an organisation in a way that will be detrimental to the country that is the real problem. ”
As if banks give a toss about the damage they do to countries, they literally don’t give a fiddlers.
@Mark McDermott: No one expects the Banks to be the arbitrators of right and wrong, they’re there to make money. That is why we have a Regulator, they’re supposed to ensure Banks do adhere to the rules.
Our utterly ineffectual Regulator was one of the reasons we ended up where we ended up AND it supports my point about the ineptitude of the people doing the hiring.
@Tricia G: unfortunately it’s not all down to the staff, there is quite a bit of incompetency but for the most part the staff are doing as they are told. Both Irish and European banking laws/regulations (or lack there of) are the real problem.
- Ireland goes bust, the EU, IMF, World Bank etc restrict Ireland borrowing and called in our dept (this didn’t just happen to Ireland)
- Ireland & EU decide Ireland should take on more dept than it owed, then shift the bourdon of that dept on to public.
- Banks in Ireland still charging higher interest rates than global average.
- Loans sold for profit to vulture funds, including performing loans, resulting in repossessions which boost bank assets.
- Not one banker/politician held accountable.
This is all policy. It can, should and must be changed!
Pay them what ye like after they repay the taxpayer the cash that bailed them out .
You might as well do a review. There is possibly an argument to be made that the cap inhibits banks from attracting talented people so Irish banks will have worse staff than international ones.
@DeShawn Jersey: flip side of that, there was no cap leading up to the crash so i dont think there is direct link between salary and performance
@Stephen Curry: salary caps are a silly idea. Salary should be based on what the person brings to the table for the business i.e if you have a banker who has an unblemished track record in their previous posts and has results to prove it then they should be paid more than whatever the competition is willing to pay. Particularly in things like banking we should really be looking abroad for people untainted by the toxic old boys club culture here.
Bring back the bankers that were running the banks before the caps were required.
We want the good times back.
These state-owned banks, AIB and PTSB, should be sold off, then the private owners can pay the staff whatever they want to and it will no longer be the taxpayers’ problem. This would be a far better option than the taxpayer having to pay to the bosses of these particular banks sums which those staff clearly don’t deserve.
Ah for fck sake where does it stop…..they proved how good they were at there jobs quite recently, if I remember correctly..
Paying, For *
Why why why – silly idea these people can no longer be trusted.
They should pay their Staff first!
500 000 + state job peace of mind and.. worth more than 800 000 in a private company. Lots of professionals would go for it!
If some other bank or institution wants to pay them more, let them move off or away.
No one is irreplaceable, & our government should not be blackmailed by the bank trade into higher salary & bonus structures.
The highly paid pseudo experts of 10 years ago were proven to be chancers.
Can anyone tell me what the going rate in Iceland for state bankers ?,would be interesting to know
How the hell are people voting for them to be paid more, as if half a mil a year isn’t enough money for anyone.
This is an unashamed disgrace in a country carrying a €205.000,000,000 debt burden.
This may be perceived as toxic 6.2/10 on this one.
Absolutely not in a country where the minimum wage is: €9.55 per hour and the average Irish weekly wage is: €734. This is the problem. The ever widening divide between those in lower and higher paid jobs. Middle class workers need to be rewarded more, not these parasites at the top. This may be perceived as toxic 5.6/10……… Am I surprised??
It’s the salary cap in the Defence Forces that Paschal should be looking at, to at least bring it up to the minimum wage that everyone, by law, is entitled to – except soldiers. I think that Paschal’s banker buddies who almost wrecked this country are more than adequately remunerated enough already. In fact most of them should be receiving the €1.70 a day prisoners allowance instead of an expectation of an increment to their obscene €500.000 salary.
500K? Damn
Let’s face it the Bankers are not the only ones ripping off this country with the blessing of the government. Give everyone a rise, never mind the 200 Billion debt, rising every day.
Someone someday will have to say, “Stop”.
Ay them what they want. It’s only money,we can always print more.
Nah that seems fine. after tax and bullsh!t it’s probably not that much for a banky type,
@thesaltyurchin: it’s just under 23K a month take home.. €5,300 a week
@Rob Cahill: minus 2 shit brats in boarding school, the partners X5 and personal trainer, an unused pony, there’s barely enough left for the Grey Poupon! All relative I suppose.
Yes it does. Downwards..
have your say