Linking investment bank remuneration to risk assumption.

Earlier this week The Guardian had an interesting piece on the bonus culture at investment banks. The Financial Services Authority has written to the chief executives of major firms to urge them to review pay policies to ensure they take account of the risks being run by traders. And UBS is already moving in this direction by devising a system that withholds part of a bonus - through a self-styled "bonus-malus" system - for up to four years.

Sensing which way the wind is blowing, data analytics vendor SAS has teamed up with human capital specialist Coalition, which does a lot of HR and salary benchmarking at top investment banks. They will be launching their joint offering and providing more detail at the Finexpo Risk and Transaction Management event in early February. But the idea - linking the risk analytics associated with trading desks and individual traders with peer-benchmarked salary and bonus information - is likely to be popular with the regulators.