eFinancialCareers

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and JPMorgan Cazenove reported significant profit increases yesterday. Headhunters say bankers at the JPMorgan joint venture have already received healthy pay rises, and that those at RBS are set to learn their fate later this week.

“People at JPMorgan Cazenove have been paid substantially more this year than they ever were in the past,” says one headhunter with a corporate finance focus. “If you worked at Caz in 2005, you would probably have earned £500,000 at the most. This year, top performers at JPMorgan Caz have earned between £1m and £1.5m.”

Yesterday JPMorgan Cazenove reported a more than doubling in its operating profit, to £123.9m. RBS also signalled a bumper year, with profit in its global banking and markets division rising 30%, to £3.42bn.

Clare Harris, director of capital markets at Alexander Mann Global Markets, says some bankers at RBS have yet to learn their bonus fate: “Expectations are that overall bonuses will be up on last year. There will be disappointed people if that is not the case.”

Headhunters say the increases at JPMorgan Cazenove are not entirely down to soaring profitability. Rather, this is the first year that bankers at JPMorgan Cazenove have received full year bonuses since the inception of the joint venture covering UK corporate finance, M&A and equity and debt capital markets in November 2004. The hefty pay hikes are said to be a result of matching Cazenove pay to JPMorgan rates.

“Cazenove were always one of the worst payers in the City,” says the headhunter. “They paid awful bonuses and awful salaries and it was seen as a privilege and honour to work there. People would spend their whole careers at Cazenove knowing they could command compensation three times higher somewhere else.”