$10.7 Mn salary credited to OCBC CEO Samuel Tsien in 2018

OCBC Bank's latest annual report shows that Chief Executive Samuel Tsien received a hike of 10.4 percent in pay in 2018. His salary increased from $9.69 Mn in 2017 to $10.7 Mn in 2018. 

Out of the total remuneration in 2018,Tsien received about $1.24 Mn was his salary, and $5.6 Mn was his bonus. The remaining amount came from deferred shares and other benefits.

These salary revelations were made in the bank's annual report. 

When compared to pay hikes of CEOs of other banks like DBS Group Holdings and United Overseas Bank, the increase in Tsien's pay seems to be less. 

While DBS Group Holdings Chief Executive Piyush Gupta took home a pay worth $11.9 Mn last year, in cash and shares combined, with a 15.5 percent pay rise, UOB's Wee Ee Cheong earned a 12 per cent pay rise to $10.56 Mn in 2018.

These hikes in the salary of CEOs are more than the average pay hikes for the Singapore Market. 

In 2018, the average increase in salary for Singapore was about 2.3 percent, as per Korn Ferry's report and even this year, the percentage in hike is pegged at only 3 percent. 

Then, what does these more than 10 percent hike in salaries of CEOs depict? 

Every year companies release and share the remunerations of their Chief Staff. However, what they don't share is how these numbers were decided. The process still remains either unknown or ambiguous, creating a lot of curiosity among the rest of the workforce. 

With the increased focus on pay transparency, the companies should now go beyond just sharing numbers and put more emphasis on the process. This practice might also help in reducing the lack of uniformity in the performance review systems in organizations. As the need of keeping these decisions transparent increases, companies will be more motivated to define these processes.