- Lloyds Banking Group
- 18 December 2020 14:06:08
Source: Sharecast
The bank's people and property director Matt Sinnott said it would not achieve the minimum profit threshold for "group performance share" awards. The bonus pool was worth £310m in 2019 and £465m the year before.
Unlike rivals Barclays and HSBC, Lloyds does not have an investment bank. Those operations boomed in 2020 as companies have raised debt and equity to get through the Covid-19 crisis and volatile markets have spurred client trading.
Sinnott said in his letter: "While we have returned to profit, we are not where we expected to be and are short of the commitments we made to ourselves and our shareholders."
He said the bank would consider awarding staff "recognition shares" in 2021 to help make up for cancelled bonuses. Lloyds' shares fell 2.1% to 35.47p at 14:05 GMT.
Britain's biggest retail bank posted a profit in the third quarter but that was not enough to offset a first-half loss caused by big bad debt provisions.
A senior executive told the FT: "You must understand how we got here. For once bankers have a chance of getting the right reputation after everything banks have done to keep things moving for customers and companies through this pandemic. Handing out cash to people when others are losing jobs … is not a great picture."
Lloyds has cut almost 2,000 jobs since September to reduce costs after putting redundancies on hold earlier in the crisis. The bank said the cancelled bonuses did not reflect its.employees' hard work and that most staff would get above-inflation pay rises aimed at those on lower salaries.
