The dealmaker
Salary: £120,000-£300,000. Bonus: £500,000-£5million or a “blow the lights out” £10 million
Suave and sophisticated, the dealmaker can command respect in the boardroom and bend the titans of industry to his or (rarely) her will.
Dealmakers belong to the City’s old establishment. They have been educated at the country’s best schools, though older members may not have attended university. Their fathers may have had a senior position in government or business and they buy their suits from Savile Row.
Dealmakers are better at persuading people than adding up the sums — they leave dull details to others. The most able can help clients to pull off transformational acquisitions or defend them from unwanted bids from rivals.
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They are master tacticians and would make good lawyers, politicians or military strategists. But banking is more lucrative. As well as a monthly salary, dealmakers take a cut of the value of transactions. In 2007 a banker reportedly pocketed £15 million for a single deal.
Dealmakers are at present preparing to close up their homes in Kensington and jet off to the Caribbean for Christmas.
The saleswoman
Salary: £120,000-£300,000. Bonus: £200,000-£1.5million or a “blow the lights out” £5 million
A less storied job but at the heart of what banks do. It is the salesman’s or saleswoman’s job to hit the phones and persuade investors to buy billions of pounds of assets, usually debt in one form or another, that the bank can make fees on.
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With companies raising unprecendented amounts of new funds through equity and debt issues over the past year, sales departments have been overrun with work, leading to a likely bumper bonus round.
Like dealmakers, the best salesmen and women have ace contacts books and their ear to the ground, so that they can pick up rumours, such as a company about to go bust. If they call this right, their bank can avoid exposure to a big blow-up such as Dubai’s recent debt crisis.
Some think that salespeople do little more than pass on information from their traders without trying to add value by persuading clients why they should bite.
They are paid a bonus of about 10 per cent of profits they generate during a year. So a £10 million credit would lead to a £1 million bonus.
The trader
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Salary: £120,000-£200,000. Bonus: £200,000-£300,000 or a “blow the lights out” £10 million
Traditionally the domain of ambitious school-leavers, most traders are now university graduates, often with maths or physics PhDs. They take bets for the bank, buying and selling anything from cocoa beans to foreign currencies.
They work gruelling hours. There is also a direct correlation between how good the bonus year is and the fortunes of Porsche and Maserati dealerships.
At work, they spend much of their time on the telephone, while those who trade based on sophisticated mathematical formulae are hunched over their computers.
A trader who brings in £40 million in annual revenues for a bank could expect a bonus of £1 million to £2 million.
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The concern at state-controlled banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland is that its star revenue generators will walk if the bank does not meet their bonus expectations this year.
It is not an empty threat: banks such as Barclays or the US players Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan are free of direct government interference and are gearing up for a bumper bonus round.
The analyst
Salary: £120,000-£200,000. Bonus: £300,000
Most bankers can add up — though not all — but some seem to have computer-sized brains.
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Tempted away from working as a research scientist or an engineer by a fat pay packet, geeks tend to be found in the research department, where as analysts they publish notes for clients on companies or economic themes, or among the bank’s quantitative traders, who use computer models to buy and sell assets.
Quantitative traders may be paid a straight cut of the profits that they generate. Analysts are less well remunerated, as the benefit that they generate for their banks is less well defined. But they will share in the annual bonus pool.
In common with most bankers, analysts are at their desks when companies publish announcements at 7am.
Top analysts sometimes jump the fence to become salesmen and women or go to hedge funds, where they can use their stellar analysis to trade, making huge profits for themselves.
The plumber
Salary: £50,000-£200,000. Bonus: £0-£300,000
The public image of a banker may be a sharp-suited powerbroker but banks’ unsung heros are the army of behind-the-scenes workers who keep highly complex operations ticking over.
Often chino-clad and tieless, a bank’s “back office” checks the enormous amount of data involved in trades and sales and carries out other technical jobs.
Keeping computer systems working is essential. Some IT departments have lifts that only they and top management can use, to reach the trading floor as quickly as possible to solve problems with millions of pounds of profit at stake.
Programmers who ensure that IT systems are at the cutting edge can expect to earn a hefty premium above the pay for similar jobs in other sectors. Partly this reflects the unsociable hours that they work to deal with problems thrown up in time zones around the world.
Human resources experts and lawyers are key, especially as banks prepare for an avalanche of complaints from bankers claiming that the Government’s drive to clamp down on bonuses goes against their contractual rights.