JPMorgan’s new compensation head for investment bankers is a fan of behavioural tests

JPMorgan has been hiring MDs to overhaul how it hires and promotes staff; now it’s hiring MDs to overhaul how they’re paid. The bank recently hired a new head of compensation for its global corporate and investment bank.

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Lucy Espinal-Rae joined JPMorgan in London after a decade at UBS, where she was most recently its global head of compensation. Under her watch last year, UBS had its largest bonus round for key risk takers in four years, beating industry expectations. She also spent five years working on compensation for SocGen.

During the chaotic merger with Credit Suisse, Espinal-Rae was UBS’ head of divisional and regional reward partnering. She said last year that behavioural tests were “key for us over [that] 12 months.” The bank tested staff in areas like risk, conduct and collaboration by looking at aspects like how quickly staff completed training assignments to find thematic issues.

Behavioural tests also have admirers within JPMorgan. An open listing at the bank, posted in June, is paying a salary of up to $205k in New York for a PhD solutions’ manager within the bank’s centralized global assessments team. The hire will help JPMorgan make “data-driven talent decisions through valid, fair, and compliant assessments that measure job-relevant capabilities and skill proficiency.” One of the goals of the assessments is to “boost retention,” implying that performing well on them can correlate to better pay or a promotion. 

It’s not clear exactly how these tests are being conducted, but the bank’s proprietary surveillance system, WADU, might be playing a role.  JPMorgan’s intranet tells employees that “no employment action may be taken based on the data in [WADU’s] dashboard alone.” That does not mean the data holds zero influence over such actions.

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