I’m currently at the WorldatWork Total Rewards conference in Brussels. One thing that has been notable about recent conferences has been the absentees. Speakers, keynotes and seminar leaders all tend to be booked months in advance. And in the business world, as we have seen to an unprecedented extent recently, a lot can happen in a matter of months. So those willing and eager to talk about HR solutions in their investment bank or insurance company, you name them – they’ve had to drop out.

Except here. And no, this is not a sign of the cloud of fear and paranoia enveloping the financial sector beginning to lift; nor is it a sign of beleaguered financial services professionals coming out of the woodwork. What it is a sign of, is that compensations and benefits (C&B) professionals in the financial sector have actually come out of this all rather well.

By no means are C&B professionals rubbing their hands together with glee in Brussels. But Trevor Blackman, head of remuneration and benefits at RBS, who spoke at the conference yesterday, readily admitted to me that C&B experts are now highly sought after in the financial sector, and will continue to be for quite a while. The senior management of such companies at the moment, it seems, have one eye on the share prices and the other on the corporate C&B packages. Not only must C&B be restructured (the money for bonuses, to take the most obvious example, is simply not there any more), it will also become increasingly affected by regulation. Creative, intelligent deployment of C&B has really come to the fore.

Another speaker who also turned up – Alexander Zelkowitz, human resources director of Austrian-based Raiffeisen Bank – half-joked that “people warned me now might not be the right time to be speaking at conferences!”. But he also gave an interesting slant on the current climate. His bank, he argued, had weathered the storm particularly well because values of honesty and integrity had always been integral to its business. The Eastern European arm especially, where employees are structured as a co-operative. This rang a bell – I recently attended a small talk in London by the Co-operative bank, about their corporate structure feeding into their laudable CSR and values, and so giving them a distinct advantage in the current climate. I was sceptical. Now, not quite so much. That said, the beer is much stronger over here.