Bank of America boosts CEO’s pay 25% to $20 million

New York: Bank of America Corp. awarded Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan $20 million for his work last year, raising his compensation 25 per cent.
Moynihan received $18.5 million in stock grants for 2016, and the board left his salary unchanged at $1.5 million, according to a regulatory filing Friday. A year earlier, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank gave him a $16 million pay package, reflecting a raise of 23 per cent. Moynihan hasn’t received a cash bonus since 2007.
Moynihan, 57, has worked to boost the lender’s profitability through cost reductions and by resolving litigation issues left over from the financial crisis. He increased profit by 13 per cent to $17.9 billion in 2016, and said in April he’d cap expenses at $53 billion by the end of 2018, a $2 billion drop from last year.
Despite dialing back costs, Moynihan didn’t achieve his long-term 60 per cent efficiency ratio target in 2016. Bank of America, the second largest US lender, ended the year with a 65 per cent ratio of non-interest expense to net income, an improvement from 69 per cent in 2015. The firm also hasn’t achieved its 12 percent target for return on tangible common equity, which remained below 10 per cent to end 2016.
Bank of America shares climbed 31 per cent in 2016, the most among the largest US deposit-taking lenders. The surge was due largely to a fourth-quarter rally in financial stocks fuelled by investor expectations that Donald Trump’s election would result in less regulation and lower taxes.