How far will pay self-sacrifice go in the Damascene conversion at Deutsche Bank?

Outlook

A man enters Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany June 9, 2015 (Reuters/Ralph Orlowski)

Is John Cryan trying to make himself the least popular executive in banking? “Many people in the sector still believe they should be paid entrepreneurial wages for turning up to work with a regular salary, a pension and probably a healthcare scheme and playing with other people’s money,” Deutsche Bank’s British-born boss said at a conference in Frankfurt.

“I sit on trading floors and wonder what drives people. I don’t fully empathise with anyone who says they turn up to work and work harder because they can be paid a little bit more, but that may be a personal view. I’ve never been able to understand the way additional excess riches drive people to behave differently.”

If the quotes, reported by Bloomberg, are accurate, Mr Cryan may be casting himself as Saul on the road to Damascus. Will Deutsche lead the way on pay?

With apologies to Shakespeare, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

This is not the first time we’ve heard this sort of thing from senior bankers. The outgoing chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Philip Hampton, once talked of the “out of body experience” he had during a conversation with a banker who he claimed was outraged at being paid “only” £4m. Sir Philip also once said bankers’ pay had been “too high for too long”.

But not the pay of mining executives, because while saying those things Sir Philip had been rubber-stamping a series of similarly excessive rewards for executives at Anglo American, as chairman of its remuneration committee. So excessive that last year there was an investor revolt.

Mr Cryan, meanwhile, was handsomely rewarded during his time at UBS for advising other banks, and he also sits on the board of Man Group, a hedge fund manager not exactly famous for its parsimony.

As with Sir Philip, it’s easy to see the ulterior motive in what Mr Cryan had to say. Sir Philip, as chairman of a state-owned bank, was currying favour with taxpayers, aghast at the industry’s practice of handing out vast rewards for failure. Mr Cryan’s audience is subtly different. What he was saying was partly for public consumption, but he was also warning Deutsche’s staff, in particularly those in its largely London-based investment bank, to knuckle down and accept reduced rations. Or else.

While I don’t disagree with a word he said, I can’t help but be cynical. Are we going to hear reports of Mr Cryan knocking on the door of the Deutsche remuneration committee to say, “chaps, you do realise you’re paying me far too much, don’t you”? I doubt it.