Financial Guaranty & Rating Agency
The Financial Guaranty & Rating Agency Compensation Program is designed to help our clients make important business decisions by leveraging the unique combination of our in-depth financial services industry knowledge, proprietary pay and performance studies and proven consulting experience. The program consists of:
Compensation Levels Benchmarking: This comprehensive report provides key compensation data on professionals across the major functions within the mono-line insurance firms and rating agencies. Our data collection process enables us to collect data by level, function, and specialization. Participants in this survey also have access to the Debt Capital Markets, Public Finance and Fixed Income Research surveys.
Scope of Business & Methods of Pay Analysis: Covers market practices related to salary increases, bonus pool accruals, turnover/hiring rates, performance measures, annual and long-term inventive plan design.
Staffing Benchmark Report: This report includes a total staff output from participating firms to produce staffing level comparatives by business, function, title, region, etc. In addition, McLagan is able to produce, for individual "hot" areas, a benchmark comparison on organization charts/structure with supporting headcount, costs, etc.
Pay & Productivity Analysis: The Pay & Productivity Analysis will provide insight to better understand and, in turn, reinforce the linkage between organizational, business unit and individual performance vs. pay. Utilizing a combination of revenue, aggregate compensation spend, and staffing information, this aspect of the study will provide participants with comparative data to benchmark their scale, production, and productivity for many positions across each line of business.
Geographic Coverage: Data is collected for incumbents located in North America, United Kingdom and Western Europe.
Compensation Plan Design:
Developed new incentive compensation program for the commercial real estate division of a regional bank to support a bank merger.
Developed annual and long-term incentive program for government-sponsored banking enterprise.
Developed broad-based long-term incentive compensation plan for the wholesale banking division of a large regional bank.
Developed annual and long-term incentive funding mechanism for a wholesale lending institution.
Compensation & Business Benchmarking:
Benchmarked competitive pay levels for the US commercial lending division of an international bank.
Benchmarked compensation and benefits as a percentage of revenue and pretax, pre-compensation profit for a government-sponsored banking enterprise.
Surveyed perquisite practices among middle market lending divisions of regional banks.
Benchmarked front office pay levels for a large leasing company.
Benchmarked pay levels for the syndication staff of a commercial finance company.
Compensation & Organizational Advisory/Counsel:
Advised a large regional bank on year-end bonus decisions in line with market practices.
Advised a wholesale lending institution on incentive plan disclosures required for government filings.
- Advised GSE on restructuring functional reporting to improve operational efficiency while creating new automated division, business, role and level descriptions to replace outdated job descriptions.
While much attention is appropriately focused on the "how much" question in compensation studies, there is great value in understanding how pay is delivered, when it is to be delivered, and dozens of other policy and market practice questions.
Pay Practices: McLagan Partners offers a broad array of pay practice analyses. Our reports summarize the scope of the Banking Businesses and the unique pay approaches observed across all participants. Through the use of questionnaires, data is collected and reported on many of the following topics:
Financial Metrics
Salary Administration and Merit Increase Practices
Types of Plans; Eligibility, Funding, Allocation, Forms of Awards/Deferrals
Performance Measures & Criteria
Bonus Pool Accruals
Turnover/Hiring Rates
Long-term Incentive Plan Designs as well as Prevalence by Business, Product, Geography and Employee Level
Non-cash Elements of Pay (Perquisites)
Mix of Pay Analyses
Staffing: A key building block for all financial services organizations is staffing. Our staffing product provides a fundamental understanding of how firms are structured to support their business. Staffing data is used by clients to gauge their presence in the market, and to make decisions regarding relative sizing of business efforts and appropriate organizational structure.
The staffing benchmark report includes total staff output from participating firms to produce staffing level comparatives by business, title, region, etc. Analysis includes written commentary, year-over-year trends, regional mix, title pyramids, front office to back office ratios and organization structure alignments. For individual "hot" areas, we are able to produce a benchmark comparison on organization charts/structure with supporting headcount, costs, etc. This staffing product will enable clients to understand:
Trends within the marketplace relative to multiple firms vying for similar resources.
A view from the top down or detailed by business and position.
Competitive threats and advantages.
Growth initiatives at competing firms.
Expense or resource allocation opportunities.
Critical ratios across divisions, products, functions and front to back office.
Productivity: The integrated use of compensation, staffing and production data provides a solid platform for decision making. The linking of compensation and other expense data to information about revenue generated yields important information about the productivity of resources. This "complete picture" approach to market data addresses our clients’ need for more context to make more informed decisions.
The Performance and Production Analysis component of our Survey Programs is designed to provide firms with feedback on market performance benchmarks for their various businesses and the market rates of compensation at each performance level. Comparing performance rankings versus compensation rankings enables firms to identify pay inequities.
In contrast to traditional McLagan compensation reports which answer the question, What is the median level of compensation? This report answers the question, What is the compensation associated with the median level of performance?
This report is useful for benchmarking overall firm performance as well as the performance of individual incumbents, branches, functions, or geographic regions.
