Compensation Consultant, Independent
Accepted answer
We had the identical argument at a bank with about 600 people in the region. What we agreed was to stop treating corporate titles as part of the level at all. Grades are global and drive pay. Corporate titles such as Associate, Vice President and Director are a separate, market-facing series with a published mapping per region, so Vice President starts at grade 9 in Asia and grade 11 in Europe.
Nobody lost a title, and Europe accepted it because the mapping is transparent and pay follows grade, not title. The one rule we enforce hard is that a transfer between regions takes the destination region's title.
