“It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.” These words, spoken in 1939 by Sir Winston Churchill a month after the Second World War began, are as apt today for banking pay as they were then for Russian foreign policy.

No bank has yet found the key to the question that dominates the political, social and regulatory discourse around the investment banking industry, and which is central to the traditional investment banking model of retaining and attracting the best talent in order to deliver the outsize returns to which banks have become accustomed.