Jane Richards (pictured), remuneration specialist at Investec, is to speak about the challenges of setting reward and pay policies for employees in the banking sector at Employee Benefits Live.
The session, titled ‘Pay strategies in today’s economic climate’, will look at these challenges in the context of the EU and UK regulations on bankers’ bonuses.
Richards said: “What people outside financial services may not know is that banking is now the most heavily regulated industry.
“In reward, since 2008, we have had a constant series of measures and interventions that we’ve had to implement that are designed to ensure we don’t encourage the wrong behaviours and we don’t reward failure.
“Recently, we’ve had directives that place limits on the actual amounts we can pay people, and in [July], we’ve had measures about taking back money long after we actually paid it.
“There’s quite a landscape of stuff that has happened and is still happening, which is quite interesting for people to know about.”
Richards will run through what the regulations are and reflect on whether they are effective. “It’s becoming more and more difficult for reward professionals to do the right thing for the right people,” she said.
“In the context of other industries, banking is now becoming one of the worst off, and we now need to think about what impact we think this is really going to have.
“There are some of us who now believe that what started off as trying to do the right thing is potentially now going to have a negative impact. It’s a bit of a romp through all the things we have had to deal with.”
Employee Benefits Live will be held at Olympia National in London on 24 and 25 September 2014.