Morgan Stanley hikes bonuses for top UK investment bankers by 67%
The Wall Street bank has paid its material risk takers an average of £1.5m after a bumper 2024 By Paul Clarke
Morgan Stanley hiked bonuses for top staff in its UK investment bank by an average of 67% last year as performance improved.
The bank paid average bonuses of £898,461 to 325 senior employees known as material risk-takers in its investment bank for 2024, according to numbers released in its Pillar 3 report earlier in April.
This compares with average payouts of £539,523 a year earlier, or an increase of 67%.
Overall compensation for MRTs at Morgan Stanley international was £1.5m, the numbers show. This is up from an average payment of £1.1m in 2023.
This was the first year when large Wall Street investment banks scrapped a long-standing cap on bonuses for MRTs, put in place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to discourage excessive risk-taking.
Morgan Stanley is among those banks to overhaul its bonus payments to reflect the changes rolled out by the UK government in October 2023. Rivals including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have set a new cap of 10 times and 25 times base salary for top employees respectively, but Morgan Stanley did not reveal a new limit.
In the report, Morgan Stanley said that it now has an “appropriate internal bonus cap”, but did not provide a number.
A spokesperson for Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
The number of employees classified as MRTs within Morgan Stanley’s investment bank reduced from 420 in 2023 to 325 people last year. The amount it spent on variable remuneration for these bankers jumped 29% to £292m.
Morgan Stanley also revealed the number of international employees earning over €1m, which jumped from 219 to 251 people. Meanwhile, 12 staffers earned over €7m, up from eight a year earlier.
The Wall Street bank hiked bonuses for its employees last year, with many of its rivals also increasing payouts after a better year for dealmaking fees. Bonuses for European dealmakers were up 20% last year, FN reported, compared with 15% rises at both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.
