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Wells Fargo is the latest in a long line of banks to raise pay for its junior bankers, keeping up a trend that has been sweeping the industry for years as Wall Street deals with a work-life balance PR problem and a race to attract and retain talent. 

Wells Fargo is now going to be starting its junior bankers at $110,000/year a new report from Bloomberg said on Wednesday. The bank last increased pay for the role not even a year ago, in August 2021, the report says. 

Companies are so desperate to retain talent on Wall Street, remember we wrote back in April that some interns on Wall Street were making up to $16,000 a month.

As we noted then, investment banks aren't just defending themselves from other investment banks, they're also defending themselves against tech companies that can sometimes offer a better quality of life for a worker. 

Recall, we wrote earlier this year that HSBC was set to double its bonuses for junior bankers in order to try and slow defections. It marked a change for the bank, which paid "less than most rivals a year ago after cutting the bonus pool at its global banking and markets division by 15%," Bloomberg reported at the time. 

“We’ve got to keep pay across the board competitive,” Greg Guyett, co-head of GBM for HSBC said last month. 

And the competition in the space is real, with investment banks jostling back and forth to stay competitive with pay and retain talent for several years now.

At the beginning of 2022, we reported that JP Morgan had raised its junior bankers' pay for the second time in a 12-month period. 1st-year investment banking analysts are now set to make $110,000, up from $100,000, The Business Times reported last month. 2nd-year analyst pay will also jump up to $125,000 and 3rd-year pay will rise to $135,000. 

Citigroup also said it was increasing pay after a blockbuster year in 2021, moving base salaries for junior bankers up to $110,000.