Morgan Stanley hikes pay for junior bankers … again
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Morgan Stanley has raised base salaries for entry-level bankers for the second time in a month, heating up the pay hike frenzy as Wall Street rivals compete for junior talent.
Junior bankers at the US investment bank will now be paid a base salary of $110,000 – up from the previous rise from $85,000 to $100,000 only a month ago, when the the bank caught up with Wall Street rivals who had made similar moves.
The new pay bracket will now also encompass starting analysts in the institutional securities division, as well as all first year bankers in the sales and trading, research, investment banking and global capital markets divisions.
The change will come into effect in January next year, according to the first reports in Business Insider.
It comes amid heated competition for new talent on Wall Street that has seen rivals Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Barclays, Nomura and UBS all make similar moves in the last few months.
The banking giants have been strengthening incentives for younger workers after up to 70 per cent of junior bankers quit their roles due to burnout from severe workloads since the onset of the pandemic.
Earlier in the year, a group of first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs leaked a presentation to senior staff stressing they had routinely been working 80-hour weeks over the last year, sometimes rising to 100-hour weeks during busy deal periods.
Morgan Stanley’s latest hike also comes after Goldman raised the stakes considerably by hiking first-year analysts at the bank to between $110,000 and $150,000 – a higher range than its rivals. Upon their second year at Goldman, analysts’ base pay will now rise to $125,000.