And a big UK welcome...to the Post Office

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News that Bank of Ireland, which operates the savings accounts offered by the Post Office, is taking steps to become a fully authorised UK bank, is extremely welcome.

It may be months off, but it would bring hundreds of thousands of Post Office savers under the protection of the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

It would end the farcical situation whereby savers with the Post Office - an apparently British institution - rely on the savings safety net of another country, Ireland.

The Post Office's parent company, Royal Mail, clearly wants this change to happen. The Financial Services Authority wants it to happen.

And Post Office savers also want the reassurance of a UK-based protection scheme.

The FSA and other authorities have a long way to go to make our depositor protection scheme simpler, easier to understand and more consistent. But this move by a major institution would be a big help.

Nationwide Building Society's annual report published last week disclosed details of its bosses' pay for the year ending 4 April.

Chief executive Graham Beale's total pay fell from £1.7m to £1.55m in a year in which the society's profits halved. The crash in profits does not give the full picture, of course, because it was a tricky year for Nationwide - it had to rescue two other building societies - Cheshire and Derbyshire - for starters.

Beale's total take-home pay may not have changed much, but its make-up certainly has. In the previous year, Beale's first as chief executive, almost half of his money was in the form of an annual bonus, but in the most recent year he had none at all. Instead, the amount payable under his 'medium term', three-year rolling bonus scheme more than doubled to £752,000.

The rest of his £1.55m was made up of a basic salary, money paid in lieu of pension contributions and other benefits. Members can decide for themselves whether they think Beale is being paid too much. They should have received voting packs last week ahead of the 16 July annual meeting and, as usual, one of the resolutions will be to approve the directors' remuneration.

But more important, if Nationwide's 12m members want to understand quite how Beale's pay was arrived at, I suspect most, like me, will be stumped. That is because the two bonus schemes - the annual one and the rolling, medium-term one - are impenetrably complex. Each scheme requires targets to be met and each is supposed to pay out within a certain maximum proportion of the lucky executive's basic salary. For instance, Beale's annual bonus is supposed to be capped at one-and-a-quarter times his basic pay and his medium bonus at one-and-a-third times.

So far so good. But then we get to the targets that need meeting. Some are quite clear, such as profit growth. In this past year, with profits up in smoke, the annual bonus was not triggered. But others are exceptionally vague, such as 'customer experience measure'. Beale's medium term bonus was paid virtually to the maximum, suggesting that he had ticked every box on the mysterious scorecard used to tot it up. (Implying, by the way, that he got top marks in the 'customer experience measure' - in sharp contrast to the number of complaints about Nationwide Financial Mail received.)