Press

Compensation for many employees of big banks and asset managers is expected to stay flat or drop this year… Equities trading and underwriting will probably be hardest hit, according to a new report by the compensation consultancy Johnson Associates. Their annual pay packages could fall by as much as 15 percent from last year. The…

Traders and investment bankers “haven’t had the revenues that I think they were expecting,” Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates, said in an interview. “Clients haven’t come back, the volumes haven’t come back.” “The economy is clearly slowing, so how fast is that going to happen I think is the big variable,” Johnson said.…

Asset gains will not push incentive compensation up due to the shift in assets to lower-fee products and the rebalance out of equities into fixed income strategies, the compensation consulting firm states in its second-quarter trends and year-end projections report released today. Revenues have replaced market gains and assets under management as predictors of incentive…

A recent wave of layoffs from some of the biggest banks is making it harder than ever to get a job on Wall Street, recruiters and other insiders say… “It’s a tough time if you’re an average performer,” Alan Johnson, CEO of Johnson Associates, told The Post. “If you’re good or very good, it’s not…

Mergers and acquisitions are prompting asset managers to reevaluate compensation — a process that can cause key personnel to flee if new pay plans don’t live up to their expectations. Typically when asset management firms merge, they try to combine their compensation structures, says Alan Johnson, managing director at Johnson Associates, a compensation consultancy. “If…

Alan Johnson, CEO of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, finds Facebook, and particularly Zuckerberg, to be brazen in undertaking personal expenditures that are a cost to the company. “Facebook, of course, they don’t care what anybody thinks,” he says. Johnson is also skeptical about the aircraft perk as a security issue. “He could reimburse the company,…

Following the first quarter, alternatives compensation is projected to remain flat or see some modest increases, according to a report from Johnson Associates. While hedge fund performance has ticked back up after a tough 2018, high watermark challenges around performance fees remain, and that could lead to a disconnect between people’s expectations and their paychecks,…

Asset managers’ incentive compensation are shaping up to remain flat in 2019. This news is sure to be met with disappointment, but Alan Johnson, managing director at compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, says that things could have been a lot worse. At the turn of the year the first quarter incentive compensation scenario looked a lot…

Alan Johnson, managing director at the consultancy, said: “An emerging trend worth noting is the clear movement of incentive plan designs towards business/unit objectives with less focus on global/overall firm results. “With the advantage of hindsight, plans had over-emphasized an ‘all for one’ philosophy, which can be less effective in more challenging environments.” Financial News / May…

CEOs of the country’s largest asset managers, and megabanks with asset management divisions, are finding themselves in the hot seat over their high earnings relative to those of their employees. The first wave of CEO pay ratio disclosures began last year, drawing scrutiny from Congress as the industry marked a decade since the 2008 financial…