RBS and NatWest sales-related bonuses scrapped

Updated

Royal Bank of Scotland is to scrap cash bonuses for staff offering products such as mortgages, loans and credit cards to customers.

The move, which comes into force on January 1, will affect 20,000 staff working across RBS and its sister brand NatWest.

The change will affect "customer facing" staff working in branches and call centres, such as branch managers, mortgage advisers and business managers.

RBS changed its incentive schemes in 2012, so that any reward staff received on top of their basic pay depended on them meeting certain customer satisfaction standards. The new change from January will remove any sort of incentive, so that staff will now have a set salary.

Staff will get an average pay rise of around 5% to compensate for the move.

RBS's scrapping of incentives applies to staff working in personal and business banking, but not investment banking.

Explaining the move, Les Matheson, CEO of personal and business banking, NatWest and RBS, said: "We're determined to keep doing things differently and we can only continue to rebuild our customers' trust if they truly believe that we are completely focused on helping them with their financial needs - which is why we will scrap all incentives for customer-facing employees in our personal and business banking business.

"Our customer-facing employees are working hard to do the right thing for our customers and we hope that these changes will go further in providing them with the confidence that every conversation they have with our colleagues is one based exclusively on their financial needs.

"Our employees will not lose out as a result of this - they will receive an increase to their annual base pay and the way we pay them will be simpler and fairer."

High-profile mis-selling scandals such as that involving payment protection insurance (PPI) have prompted concerns about staff within the banking industry generally pushing unsuitable products.

The announcement by RBS was welcomed by Which?

The consumer group's executive director, Richard Lloyd, said: "It's good to see RBS making this positive change to enable staff to focus on customers' needs rather than sales.

"We now want to see all banks and the regulators focused squarely on delivering cultural reform across the industry to put customers at the heart of banking."

The Rise And Fall of Banker Bonuses
The Rise And Fall of Banker Bonuses



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