Standard Chartered’s bankers are hitting new records for pay
After the American and European Q4 reporting seasons, it’s reporting season for a more niche type of bank: UK-based banks with their primary operations in Asia. It was HSBC’s turn today, but Standard Chartered’s turn yesterday.
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Generally, the bank did well. It managed to deliver a year early on its 3-year plan, and it bumped up its bonus pool by 10% to $1.9bn. Kindly, it even budgeted a 2.6% increase in its salaries globally, weighted particularly towards more junior staff.
The real winners, however, are the bank’s highest earners. As well as Q4 of 2025 results, Standard Chartered also published its full-year Basel Pillar 3 report. And that report detailed how the bank paid its “investment banking” material risk takers.
MRTs are defined as people whose “professional activities have a material impact on the risk profile of the firm,” and automatically includes all people who earn over £660k. The “investment banking” function, according to the Basel framework, also appears to include sales & trading professionals.
Standard Chartered’s record 385 investment banking MRTs earned an average of $1.48m each for their work in 2025, which was a 9% increase on the $1.36m they earned on average in 2024. The biggest increase came from variable compensation (bonuses) paid – from an average of $765k in 2024 to an average of $870k in 2025, an increase of 14% between the two years.
Interestingly, however, Standard Chartered “only” paid 282 over €1m ($1.18m) in 2025, which was a slight decline from the 293 that earned over that sum in 2024. However, the bank paid one person over €16m ($19m), which it hasn’t done since before at least 2019, if ever.
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