Pay for Natwest’s top boss balloons to £6.6m as bonuses soar
The boss of Natwest has defended a bumper rise to his pay packet in the last financial year as the bank dished out the cash on employee bonuses.
The group’s chief Paul Thwaite pocketed a £6.6m package, an increase of 33 per cent from £4.9m in 2024.
“I recognize that senior roles in financial services in banking actually, in wider professional services, are very well paid,” Thwaite said on Friday.
The hike takes Thwaite’s package to pre-financial crisis levels of pay, making him the highest since Fred Goodwin’s £7.7m in 2006. Under the new remuneration policy approved at Natwest’s AGM, Thwaite has the potential to surpass Goodwin’s pay if maximum performance targets are met.
The major uptick in Thwaite’s pay came from a new policy at the AGM which increased the maximum annual bonus to 150 per cent from 100 per cent of the base salary and introduced a new performance share plan capped at 300 per cent on salary.
“There’s obviously a very close link between reward and performance, and it goes up and down depending upon performance,” Thwaite said.
The pay reward came after Natwest hit a post-financial crisis high profit of £7.7bn in 2025 financial year, up from £6.2bn.
Natwest bankers cheers to deregulation
Thwaite’s packet benefited from the City ditching the EU’s bonus cap which restricted bonuses to 100 per cent of a fixed salary or to 200 per cent in the event of shareholder approval. The move was intended to disincentivise high-risk decisionmaking by senior bankers in the wake of the financial crash.
Post-Brexit Britain ditched the cap under Kwasi Kwarteng’s brief Chancellorship in a bid to lure senior bankers back to London.
The move, which had courted controversy, was one of the few introduced in Kwarteng’s so-called ‘mini-budget’ which did not get overturned by successive chancellors.
Natwest also dished out around £495m in employees bonuses for the 2025 financial year – a 10.8 per cent increase from 2024’s bonus pool.
The banking watchdog unveiled new rules last year that meant bankers would be able to collect their bonuses much sooner in a major deregulation push.
The overhaul of bonus rules paved the way for part-payment of bonuses for the most senior bankers from year one, rather than year three under previous rules.
The amount of time that senior bankers must now wait before receiving their full bonus, known as a deferral period – will be cut from eight to four years.