Weekly Global News Wrap Up: European banks struggle to lure talent against high-paying US players; EU banks face tougher hurdles in Saudi

And a Greek bank is gearing for $4b in bad loan sales.

From CNBC: European banks are finding it hard to recruit the right people due to new regulations and intense competition from some of their U.S. peers that dole out more attractive compensation packages. 

A junior-level analyst in a trading role at a European bank can start at anything between $50,000 to $60,000 for a base salary. On top of this they would receive allowances and a bonus, which can sometimes be given in the form of company shares.

This is where U.S. banks differ as they tend to stick to cash bonuses, taking the overall compensation of a junior analyst to somewhere between $80,000 to $100,000. This gap starts to widen more as employees go up the ladder.

From Bloomberg: European Union banks will face higher hurdles in dealing with clients from countries including Saudi Arabia as the bloc moves to tighten controls on illicit financial flows.

Panama and the U.S. Virgin Islands will also be put alongside Iran and North Korea on a new EU roll call of 23 countries outside the bloc identified as posing higher risks for terrorist financing and money laundering, according to people familiar with its content. 

EU banks dealing with customers from those countries will have to apply additional checks, also known as “enhanced customer due diligence.” 

From Bloomberg: Greek lender Alpha Bank is preparing two non-performing loan sales  that will be offered in the second half of 2019 that could remove as much as 3.5 billion euros ($4 billion) of bad debt from its balance sheet, according to two people familiar with the plans.

One of the portfolios, dubbed Neptune, comprises 1.5 billion euros of loans secured against assets of small and medium-sized enterprises, the people said, asking not to be named because the plans aren’t public. The second package, known internally as Orion, amounts to 2 billion euros of securitized residential mortgages, the people said.