Troubles at Barclays Prompt a Shake-Up—and Banker Exits

livemint.com:

Barclays executives embarked on a drastic overhaul of the British bank’s Wall Street arm early this year. The goal: prove it can hang with the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. They replaced key leaders and laid out a strategy to become a top five player in as many lines of business as it can, if not investment banking overall.

So far, the changes have done little to lift its stock and led to an exodus of senior bankers—more than 30 of the investment bank’s roughly 200 managing directors have left. Fifteen years after its fire-sale purchase of Lehman Brothers’ core assets jump-started its investment-banking business, the British lender is still trying to find its footing. A combination of a big U.K.

retail bank with credit-card businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, Barclays has, unlike its British peers, maintained a hefty investment bank serving big investors and companies. For years, Barclays executives, many of them alumni from JPMorgan, have talked about fashioning the bank after its much larger U.S. rival.

Yet, unlike JPMorgan, Barclays’sshares trade at about 45% of book value, among the lowest ratios among its Wall Street rivals, reflecting a chasm between how the bank and investors value the lender. It holds billions of dollars of debt on its books tied to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and last year paid a hefty fine for a humiliating blunder in which it accidentally sold unregistered securities. Barclays’s London-listed shares hover below where they were five years ago and slipped another 5% this week after the bank reported a drop in revenue.