Japan Financial Services Bonus Survey

View Morgan McKinley's latest bonuses in the Japanese financial sector.

Between January and February this year we’ve conducted our annual Financial Services bonus survey. We have received 286 responses from individuals from various industries such as securities, asset management, insurance, consulting and fin-tech, across the front, middle and back offices.

Here are the key findings:

The number of respondents that received a bonus was slightly down on last year. Those that did receive bonuses, however, have seen an increase.

Almost 40% of respondents received a higher (or significantly higher) bonus compared to 30% last year. However, only 18% were satisfied with their bonus pay out - a similar level of satisfaction to last year. Some of the qualitative feedback from the survey would suggest that a number of professionals felt their organisations or departments posted strong (or even exceptional) results, yet their increase was “mediocre” and in some instances no bonus was paid at all.

While global performance in some organisations brought down payments locally, one respondent stated this was the best bonus they had earned since 2010.

Several middle and back office staff raised the point that these days there is no direct correlation between quality of work, and volume for non client facing functions.

Less of our respondents will receive a salary increase this year 53% versus almost 60% last year.

Interestingly, those who have received an increase in base salary have received considerably larger increases than in 2019/20. More than half of respondents (56.5%) will receive more than 5% increase in their base salaries versus only 32% the previous year.

A third of the respondents felt the impacts of the pandemic has had a negative impact on their own organisations, a third felt neutral, and a third positive. So, unsurprisingly looking ahead to 2021, there is an even spread across those who are bullish, bearish and sitting on the fence for the year ahead.

Summary:

Unprecedented, bizarre and even incredible are some of the words we have heard used to describe the last 12 months. Despite the financial markets holding up well as well as a number of financial institutions performing well, some professionals still felt they did not necessarily get the benefits of the results in their bonus payments whilst others felt that given the circumstances, being on par or a bit better than last year was not a bad result and if anything it could have been a lot worse.