The Covid crisis, pay and bonuses – event series

We think pay and bonuses for 2020 across the industry will be trickier than ever to calculate and could cause significant problems for the industry from a political and PR perspective.

This event series involves three separate workshops that will focus on the HR perspective, the political perspective, and the PR & comms perspective.

Our thesis is:

• Pay & bonuses has long been the lightning rod for anger with banking and finance, but the debate has subsided over the past few years. Pay has come down across (most of) the industry and memories of the excesses from the last financial crisis have faded.
• How the industry responds to this crisis will redefine its relationship with government and society for the next decade
• In the last crisis, it was the problem but this time round the industry is a big part of the solution – and it has made a good start. It has made a lot of the right noises about behaving responsibly, sharing the pain etc
• Some sectors of the industry (eg. markets, DCM) will have a very good year in 2020. That means many people will expect to be paid very well this year, which is going to collide with a pretty tough economic outlook for most people.
• This contrast may reignite public and political anger at high bonuses, potentially undoing all of the good work done so far by the industry