Chinese banks should defer some pay - regulator

BEIJING, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Chinese banks should defer some of their executives' pay so that performance can be judged over a longer time horizon, a senior regulator said on Sunday.

The call by Jiang Dingzhi, a vice chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, echoed moves by a growing group of countries to get banks to reduce the emphasis on annual profits in determining pay, a short-term culture that has been blamed in part for the global financial crisis.

But unlike some Western governments taking action to curb bank bonuses, Jiang described the idea of deferred payment as a recommendation and did not say that Beijing would introduce regulation requiring such a compensation practice.

"As all countries are earnestly reforming their financial industry and the global system is changing, China's banking industry should feel urgency to improve its regulatory framework, corporate governance and risk control," Jiang said at a financial forum in Beijing.

Pay at state-owned Chinese banks is already extremely low by global standards and their executives are typically bureaucrats appointed by the government.

The presidents of the country's three biggest banks -- Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (1398.HK) (601398.SS), China Construction Bank (0939.HK) (601939.SS) and Bank of China (601988.SS) (3988.HK) -- are each paid roughly $230,000 per year.

Chinese banks were sheltered from the ravages of the global financial crisis because of their limited overseas investments and the country's largely closed capital account that reduced its exposure to volatility abroad. (Reporting by Langi Chiang and Simon Rabinovitch; Editing by Alex Richardson)