Optiver raised pay to £592k in London but its people elsewhere earned more
2025 was a bumper year for electronic trading firms, and many of the major players raised compensation for their traders as a result. Accounts for Optiver's UK entities suggest that they're no exception, but payrises at the Dutch firm don't look as extravagant as those seen at Jane Street.
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Optiver released accounts for three entities this week, only one of which, 'Optiver UK Limited,' reported headcount and pay figures. Those accounts showed that the firm had increased its UK headcount from 133 to 148. Optiver UK's spending on compensation ('wages' plus 'profit sharing') had increased to £591.5k ($792k) per head. The overall spending on profit sharing in the entity had increased by 46.6% despite the firm reporting an increase of just 29% for its global profits for the year back in March. Optiver's London traders may therefore be high performers.
Optiver has ten times the amount of London staff it had in 2020. The firm has also doubled its UK headcount since 2022, the year it moved into a new office in the city; Bloomberg reported at the time that the new office had enough space for 200 employees, so there's presumably plenty of room for more.
Optiver pays staff in its other offices more. Accounts filed for the firm's Australian entity in May showed that Optiver paid 443 employees an average of AUD1.4m ($996.2k). Average pay in the UK isn't that much more than the $700k packages that Optiver is giving to its 2027 graduate hires.
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