By Kirstin Ridley and Carolyn Cohn
LONDON (Reuters) -Senior British bankers will be able to cash in bonuses up to three years sooner under proposals unveiled by the Bank of England on Thursday, as it pushes ahead with reforming tough credit crisis-era rules to boost competition.
One year after British regulators scrapped a decade-long cap on banker bonuses, BoE Deputy Governor Sam Woods proposed moving to a five-year bonus deferral period for all senior managers, down from the eight years some currently face.
Regulators imposed rules to defer senior manager bonuses after the 2007-2009 financial crisis triggered concerns that bumper year-end cash bonuses could encourage bankers to take excessive risks and undermine the global financial system.
But Woods said deferral periods were longer than necessary to create the right incentives for financial safety – and that they could harm Britain’s competitive edge.
“I would also observe that the UK has become something of an outlier in terms of the length of deferral that we require, and that this may well be damaging for competitiveness,” he told the annual Mansion House dinner for London’s financial sector.
Some senior managers are currently not allowed to cash in any of their bonuses for three years. The BoE plans to allow vesting of bonuses on a pro-rata basis after the first year, Woods said.
Rival financial centres, including those in the European Union, typically defer bonuses to between three and five years.
The plans would make London “a more attractive location for internationally mobile, high-flying bankers,” said Adrian Crawford, employment partner at law firm Kingsley Napley, adding that the current rules “have always been seen by many as political banker-bashing rather than genuine risk management”.
UK regulators have been told to balance their traditional rule-making with secondary duties to promote growth as successive British governments have tried to kick-start a sluggish economy and reinvigorate London’s financial centre.
Woods said that risk was the “lifeblood of a thriving capitalist economy”. But he also warned that efforts to improve regulation should not “morph into a general backsliding on the system’s fundamental resilience”.
Nikhil Rathi, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), meanwhile promised to publish further details in November about the regulator’s proposals to publicly name companies under investigation if it believes this is in the public interest.
The FCA said this would help deter wrongdoing and encourage whistleblowing and transparency. But the looser “public interest” test marks a change from a previous strategy of only disclosing such details in “exceptional circumstances” – and spooked lawmakers, lawyers and the industry.
“Next month, we will provide more data and case studies on how a public interest test could work in practice,” Rathi told the dinner.
He said the FCA was aware about the potential outsized impact on small firms, that he would continue to listen to feedback and that a board decision on the way forward would be reached early next year.
(Reporting by Kirstin Ridley and Carolyn Cohn; editing by Sinead Cruise and Susan Fenton)
