Private banks in Asia have copped a fair bit of flack recently (not least from eFinancialCareers readers), with accusations that they’ve been pushing their products at the expense of serving their clients properly.

Moreover, during the boom times, firms were too happy to hire and took on too many inexperienced privilege bankers (comments on a recent eFC article suggest that the average RM in Asia has barely made it out of kindergarten).

Could linking compensation to client satisfaction be one way to attract more experienced, less greedy bankers who would really represent their clients' interest and wouldn’t sell their services so aggressively?

The idea is gaining ground down in the world of commercial banking, with firms such as Citigroup, DBS, OCBC and UOB beefing up their customer-protection policies in Singapore. But it doesn’t seem like customer satisfaction is making many major inroads in high-net-worth private banking.

“Client satisfaction is ambiguous and difficult to measure,” adds Nick Hughes, a senior consultant at recruiters WH Marks Sattin.

Jack Bennett, director of Hong Kong search firm Lion Rock, says American private banks in Asia still pay their relationship managers based on their revenue production, while European firms typically consider a mixture of AUM, net new money and revenue.

Some banks are clamping down on underperformers by demanding that targets are met before revenue-percentage bonuses kick in. EFG Bank is taking things one step further. If you don’t meet your target in your first year, your base salary gets cut in your second.

“They won’t fire you. Your salary just goes down and down until you quit,” says one headhunter, who asked not to me named.

But such measures actually point to an increased reliance on boosting revenue, rather than on softer, client-friendly factors.

While, as Hughes suggests, private bankers are now trying to develop more consultative, long-term relationships with clients, we may have to wait a while before customer satisfaction has a major impact on the way they are paid.

Can client satisfaction be measured? Should banks account for it when allocating bonuses? Let us know below.