Remuneration and banks, big funds fail managers

Large European funds are less timid than the Americans in their dialogue with managers of multinationals and banking giants. Especially on salaries. In their strategies to pressure companies, institutional investors have in fact stressed Say on Pay, i.e. the request for clarification on remuneration, more than in the past.

The Anglo-Saxon platform Aqtion collects the stewardship strategies and votes of 65 institutional giants managing $91 trillion.

This year, Aqtion delved into the voting at the shareholders' meeting in relation to managerial remuneration as well as a number of proxy advisor choices.

Of particular interest here, however, is the monitoring of four major banks: UniCredit, Bank of America (Bofa), Ubs and Goldman Sachs. Of these banking giants, 18 European and North American investors, who have already made their respective choices known, have been put under the lens. Among them are, for example, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund and US pension funds such as Calpers and Calstrs. Result? Ubs among the four banks is the one that saw more votes in favour than against (see table above). The others, on the other hand, were more heavily taxed.

In the documentation provided by Aqtion, the motivations of those who rejected bankers' remunerations are also indicated. Take UniCredit, the credit institution led by Andrea Orcel: the Candriam investment house, for example, was critical of the 'one-off bonuses to the CEO and other top managers without sufficiently convincing justification'. Even Aberdeen Investments said it was 'concerned about the level of salary increases granted to executives'.