Dude, where’s my bonus?
That’s the question bankers at UBS have been asking themselves over the past few weeks.
While most of their colleagues on the Street either have received — or at least have been informed what their year-end pay might look like — UBS bankers remain in the dark about bonuses.
The Zurich-based firm is at least two weeks behind in handing out bonuses.
Not that bankers at Switzerland’s No. 1 bank will be overjoyed once they get them — because they will be as much as 40 to 50 percent less than in prior years.
Typically, firms inform employees about their bonuses between December and February.
The bank, sources said, expects to tell its employees about their bonuses some time in mid-March — which would mean many staffers would be learning the size of their bonuses nearly a month later than usual and after all of the bank’s peers.
The pay delay comes as UBS boss Sergio Ermotti is undertaking a massive restructuring of the bank to re-emphasize its wealth-management business and shrink its riskier fixed-income operations in order to appease its Swiss regulators weary of the bank’s misadventures in banking.
More than 10,000 of the bank’s employees are slated to be eliminated over the next several years as part of a wide-ranging restructuring initiative.
That retooling and an agreement reached last month to cough up a whopping $1.5 billion fine to settle charges of rigging a key interest rate known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, with a group of regulators may be causing some of the delays in bonus payments, one insider speculated.
A UBS spokeswoman declined to comment.
One bright spot for the bank comes from Bob McCann, CEO of UBS Group Americas, and his 7,000 wealth managers, who are primarily paid on a commission basis and are generating on average $1 million annually in revenues — a high-water mark on Wall Street.