Highest-paid Irish banker earned €24m, data reveals

Eighteen people in the financial sector topped €1m – but just two of them were women

Ireland’s best-paid banker earned €24.46m in 2022, including more than half upfront and the rest coming to them in deferred bonuses.

The massive earnings mean the financial high-flyer is among the best paid anywhere in the EU, new figures from the European Banking Authority (EBA) show.

Ireland is also home to the highest gender non-conforming earner in EU finance, the data shows.

One person working here who earns between €2m and €3m identified as having a gender other than male or female – the only such high earner in finance in the EU.

The total number of people classified as high earners – defined as making more than €1m a year – at banks and investment firms in Ireland increased slightly to 55 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is provided. They are overwhelmingly men. In financial institutions, including retail and investment banks, there were 18 people in the €1m-plus club in 2022 here; 15 were men and two women.

Just two of the 18 worked in retail banking – one man and one woman, likely to have been Ulster Bank CEO Jane Howard.

Across Europe, fewer than one in 10 top-paid financiers are female, research shows, highlighting the wide gender pay gap in the financial services industry.

In Ireland, the data shows one woman paid between €1m and €2m, and one woman paid between €2m and €3m.

The bigger cohort of high earners in Ireland are not in traditional banks but work in what the EBA classes as investment firms – which includes the likes of hedge funds and asset managers. They are all men.

The Irish figures show a total of 37 men and no women earning more than €1m each working in the sector.

Twenty of them were paid between €1m and €2m; 10 got between €2m and €3m; three between €3m and €4m;one between €5m and €6m; and two more were on somewhere between €6m and €7m.

Ireland’s stand-out earner though was in a league of his own and made €24.46m in the year.

The anonymised EBA data does not say where the person works or what they do, though it suggests their role falls under the heading of “Dealing on own account, underwriting and placing of instruments”, which suggests they may be a trader or active in wholesale financial markets.

The senior male executive is classed as staff by their employer and had a “basic” salary of €2.24m, with the vast bulk of their pay coming as bonuses. Their socalled deferred pay totalled €22.23m in the year, just over half of which, €11.9m, was in the form of deferred pay. That typically includes things such as share awards that vest over time and only if certain conditions are met.

That pay package puts the financier in the top flight of European earners. The EBA data indicates that the EU’s highest-salaried banker in 2022 was in Spain, where one individual had basic pay of €13.1m.

The biggest overall remuneration package went to someone at an investment firm in France, who was awarded €30.7m, which, like the Irish big earner, was mostly in bonuses.