UK
Merrill wasn’t going to pay too badly
16 October 2008
Until it stumbled into the arms of Ken Lewis and his campaign to curb the excesses of Wall Street, it would appear that Merrill was actually planning to reward its people quite well this year.
According to one of our ever popular estimations of average compensation, mean pay at Merrill was due to be marginally higher in 2008. The bank’s Q3 results indicate that average comp per head was coming in at $183k for the first nine months, compared to $180k for the same period last year.
This isn’t too bad when you consider that Merrill went out of its way to maintain bonuses in 2007. Last year compensation and benefits at the bank totaled $15.8bn, despite losses of $8bn. This was only marginally down from 2006, when payouts reached a record $16.9bn.
Whether pay continues to hold up will depend on compensation expenditure in the fourth quarter now that Merrill is one with BofA. Lewis’s comments suggest the average Merrill banker could be disappointed yet.
My knowledge as a former ML employee for 3 years about Merrill's pay is that they pay good only the "top performers" (not necessarly selected on a meritocrastic basis) and then a good 40-50% get very low bonuses... really really lower than IBK boutiques (5%, 10%, 15%, I mean).
But on newspapers and (don't know why) always on this efinancialcareer web site, you will always read that ML pays to everybody the level it actually pays only to the top performers, and you never see the numbers payd to the lower performers (50% of the people working there 24/7)...
Unfortunately, is difficult to get access to the real figures that in my opinion are always 50% down of what you read here or other news providers (it's all based on a business rationale, forget the truth)
M&A 16 Oct 2008
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