Nationwide boss’s pay doubles to £4.7m after Virgin Money deal (The Times)
Dame Debbie Crosbie’s total pay has jumped from £2.49 million in 2025 after the takeover created Britain’s second-biggest mortgage lender.
Monday June 8 2026, 3:15pm, The Times
By Jack Barnett
The boss of Nationwide’s pay package has nearly doubled over the past year after Britain’s biggest building society almost tripled her maximum bonus entitlement to more than £3 million.
Dame Debbie Crosbie received total remuneration of nearly £4.7 million in the year to March 31, up from £2.49 million over the previous 12 months, Nationwide announced in its annual report on Monday.
She was given an annual regular salary of just over £1.2 million in the 2025-26 financial year, up from £1.15 million in the previous year. The uplift in the entire pay packet was mainly driven by an increase in Crosbie’s bonus entitlement, with her “annual performance pay” up to £1.75 million from £1.11 million.
She is also in line for a £1.46 million “long-term performance” bonus, which, taken alongside her pension allowance and yearly wage, took Crosbie’s entire remuneration to £4.67 million over the past year. Members voted in favour of tripling Crosbie’s maximum long-term bonus in 2024.
The near-doubling in Crosbie’s pay comes after Nationwide, which she joined as chief executive in 2022, completed the purchase of Virgin Money for £2.9 billion, a deal first announced in 2024 before the lender, founded by Sir Richard Branson, was fully merged with the building society in April this year. Nationwide members were not given a vote on the Virgin deal.
The takeover created the UK’s second-largest mortgage provider behind Lloyds Banking Group. Crosbie spent more than two decades at CYBG, formerly Clydesdale Bank, before leaving to become chief executive of TSB for three years in 2019. In 2018, CYBG acquired Virgin Money for £1.7 billion.
Crosbie’s enhanced pay also comes after a cap on bankers’ bonuses was abolished nearly three years ago, a move first announced by the then chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng at the 2022 mini-budget and then seen through by his successor, Jeremy Hunt, in October 2023.
Over the past year, Nationwide has launched an advertising blitz to market itself as a customer-first bank, emphasising its decision to keep high street branches open as Britain’s other biggest lenders shut theirs.
However, the sharp increase in Crosbie’s pay puts her within touching distance of the remuneration packages handed to the bosses of the UK’s largest listed lenders. As a mutual lender, Nationwide is owned by its customers rather than external shareholders, an operational structure that is designed to reinvest profits back into the business to minimise costs for borrowers.
In February, Barclays announced that its chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan’s pay would rise to just over £15 million from about Ell million; Georges Elhedery, the boss of HSBC, received a £6.6 million pay package, up 18 per cent on the previous year; and Charlie Nunn, the head of Lloyds Bank, received total pay of £7.4 million, up from £6.2 million.
Nationwide’s pre-tax profits fell to £1.49 billion from £2.3 billion in the previous year “after taking account of the Nationwide fairer share payment” the mutual said on Monday. This involved the distribution of about £400 million to more than four million customers, the fourth payment since the profit-sharing initiative started.
In a note within Nationwide’s annual report, Crosbie said that the mutual prioritised “customer experience and value” in the past year and would continue to drive towards its overriding “purpose: Banking — but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.”
At present the building society is embroiled in a battle with James Sherwin-Smith, a Nationwide customer who claims the mutual has tried to scupper his attempt to get elected to the board, after it was confirmed that members would be given a default “quick vote” option in a ballot on his candidacy scheduled for July.
If successful, Sherwin-Smith would be the first Nationwide member to sit on the first Nationwide member to sit on the board in almost 25 years.
When the mutual denied its members a say on the Virgin Money takeover two years ago, Crosbie said: “We’ve seen really limited demand in our customer member base for a vote.”
Kevin Parry, the chair of Nationwide, said:
“Debbie Crosbie’s pay has increased because it includes a long-term bonus for the first time, reflecting the society’s outstanding performance and development over the last three years.”
Who is Dame Debbie Crosbie?
Over the past three decades, Dame Debbie Crosbie, a born and bred Glaswegian, has worked for some of the most recognisable names in the UK’s financial industry (Jack Barnett writes).
After receiving a degree in international relations in 1991 from the University of Strathclyde, she started her career as a graduate at the insurer Prudential based in its Glasgow office. She then moved on in the late 1990s to Clydesdale Bank, where she spent around two decades and rose to become its chief operating officer.
Heading TSB Bank from 2019 to 2022 was a formidable challenge for her first time as chief executive, with the bank still reeling from IT meltdown in 2018 that lett customers unable to access online banking for weeks. The lender was ultimately fined almost £50 million for the malfunction, which dealt it serious reputational damage.
Since taking the top job at Nationwide in 2022, Crosbie has overseen possibly the largest shake-up of Britain’s largest building society in its history, mainly via the £2.9 billion acquisition of Virgin Money.
CYBG had bought Virgin Money for £1.7 billion in 2018, when Crosbie was chief operating officer of CYBG. Clearly she likes the business, although we will never know whether Nationwide’s customers, who the mutual is ultimately supposed to make money for, do as well: they were denied a vote on the deal.
As such, it is understandable then that James Sherwin-Smith is trying to become the first customer to be elected to Nationwide’s board in nearly a quarter of a century. He runs a campaign website called James4Nationwide.co.uk where he claims his victory at a ballot scheduled next month would crystallise “long-term stewardship” of the lender.
At the end of last year, Rachel Reeves announced that Crosbie would succeed Aviva’s chief executive, Dame Amanda Blanc, as the government’s “women in finance champion”. However, according to latest documents, Nationwide’s median gender pay gap last year was 29.6 per cent, more than double the UK-wide average of 12.8 per cent.
According to researchers at the High Pay Centre, pay for the average worker at Nationwide has risen by a much lower 8.6 per cent.
Andrew Speke, interim director of the lobby group, said: “This dramatic increase in CEO pay, combined with the absence of a binding member vote on remuneration, is clearly not in accordance with the principles of fairness and democratic governance that building societies are supposed to uphold.”