RANKED: The pay gap between junior and senior staff at 18 top UK banks

All bankers pick up what for most people would be a huge wage - but within the industry there is resentment in circles about the huge gaps between how much junior and senior bankers earn.

To shed some light on how big the gap is, salary benchmarking site Emolument created the Fairness Index, a ranking that marks banks on the gap between the pay of associates and managing directors at some of the biggest banks operating in the UK to get a sense of the differences.

To do this, Emolument calculated the percentage of managing director's salary earned by associates, before giving each bank a score out of 20 based on the result.

Associates are mid-level employees who usually have at least a few years of experience under their belts, which means they're usually still in their 20s. MDs on the other hand, are some of the most senior employees at any firm, overseeing teams of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

The figures are almost entirely the reverse of the overall scoreboard, with French, Italian, and German banks ranking as the fairest, while American and British banks have the largest gaps between junior and senior employees.

Speaking about the results of its fairness study, Emolument cofounder and chief operating officer Alice Leguay said: "We expect that our Fairness Index will vary from one year to the next depending on the bank's needs to retain certain generations of employees. As we saw this year, Associates across the board saw a substantial bump up in their bonuses, while in the previous couple of years they had been overlooked in favour of revenue-generating staff such as MDs and Directors."