Insights

Published in NICG Board Dynamics – "The Courage to Judge", 2026/1

Every spring, Switzerland's say-on-pay season delivers the same headlines: a number, a percentage, a vote. What traditional benchmarking rarely discusses is what lies beneath the total figure: how much risk a CEO's pay actually carries, and how long it takes before that value is truly realised.

In this article, Dr. Stephan Hostettler, Johanna Kaffanke, and Hanna Gadola of HCM International argue that benchmarking total direct compensation (TDC) alone misses a crucial point: two CEOs earning the same headline pay can face fundamentally different performance risk and vesting horizons. Their newly developed "HCM PayMap" brings pay level, risk, and duration together into a single view, giving boards a sharper lens for comparison.

Drawing on 378 data points from Swiss listed companies between 2015 and 2025, the authors find that higher CEO pay tends to come with greater performance dependency and longer time horizons, a signal that compensation benchmarking should move beyond how much companies pay, and focus more on how incentives are structured to support long-term value creation.