Barclays Bank Essay Example for Free

Barclays Bank Essay Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in retail banking, credit cards, corporate banking, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services with an extensive international presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. With over 300 years of history and expertise in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs nearly 147,000 people. Barclays moves, lends, invests, protects money for more than 48 million customers and clients worldwide. (Barclays 2009) Barclays currently owns more stock (3.9%) than any other stockholder in the largest company on the planet, Exxon Mobil. The fundamental principal to Barclay’s philosophy is to include the interests of all of their shareholders from customers, employees, shareholders and the wider community in route to providing a valued and prosperous circumference of satisfied stakeholders. (thebanker.com, 2009) A high priority is placed on dealing with three lines of operations. Firstly, the banking division that provides up front service and customer attention to United Kingdom retail and business banking customers. The UK retail banking side courts some for 14 million accounts, servicing around 566,000 customers, while the business side lends service to primarily middle to larger sized businesses of around 180,000 customers. A second major focus for Barclays is Private Clients. Barclays stands today as the largest retail stockbroker in the United Kingdom, with clients mainly in the UK and the continental Europe. The gist of the client makeup is high net worth and clients of corporate billing. Third is the International Retail and Commercial Banking sector of Barclay’s business. Barclays has some 800 international branches placed throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East, which provide a large array of services including current accounts, savings, mortgages and loans. (thebanker .com 2009) Others smaller areas of focus for Barclays are Barclays Capital, Barclaycard, Barclay Global Investors and Woolwich. It is within these areas that Barclay is placing a larger focus towards growing throughout the international markets. Barclays Capital is a global investment bank which provides advice and solutions to the financial and risk management needs of corporate, institutional and government clients.Barclaycard has some 11.2 million UK customers with 2.9 million cards issued internationally. This happens to have been the UKs first credit card and also the leader in card services provided over the internet 800,000 customers using the online account services. Barclaycard operates internationally throughout Europe, the United States and Africa and has recently made efforts to expand even more into the United States with the acquisition of the US credit card, Juniper Financial Corporation in December 2004. Barclays Global Investors is a world leader in providing investment management products and services and is also a global leading asset manager. In 1971 Barclays Global Investors created the first index strategy and followed this in 1978 with the first quantitative active strategy. Barclays Global Investors holds some 68 million British pounds in Exchange Traded Funds with over 100 funds in ten international markets for individual and institutional investors. Lastly, Woolwich is a mortgage business that was acquired by Barclays in 2000. It has been transformed into a division that deals largely with home financing and lends its branding to Barclays mortgages. Barclays has placed a great deal of interest in international growth beginning as far back as 1925 with the merger that began the formation of Barclays International Operations of three banks: the Colonial Bank, the Anglo Egyptian Bank and the National Bank of South Africa. This pushed Barclays into Africa, the Middle East and the West Indies. By the 1980s Barclays became the first bank to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. and by 1986 was the first British bank to be listed on the Tokyo and New York Stock Exchanges. Barclays Capital formed around the same time establishing an investment banking operation that today manages larger corporations and institutional businesses. In the mid-1990s Barclays formed Barclays Global Investors through the purchase of Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisers which was combined with Barclays BZW Investment Management. Barclays has also kept pace with innovation with concepts such as online customized servicing through Barclay s Private Bank and Premiere Banking. These steps have kept Barclays competitive in the banking industry and guided them towards a promising path in international growth. (thebanker.com) Foremost to continually compete internationally, Barclays must strive to perform customer service at an utmost level of excellence. This will promote Barclays worldwide as a business that can be relied upon time after time for small individual accounts as well as huge corporate accounts. To accomplish this, Barclays must identify their customer groups and the needs associated with each particular group and develop products and services that will be of great value to their customers. The practices that have worked in the past must be reconfigured to work for years to come and keep Barclays updated with the high changing IT world. This will call for new investments into new levels of technology that can help offer higher levels of service to its customers. Along with the apparent increase in speed that IT will allow Barclay to accomplish routine tasks, technology will also reduce risk of errors and fraud. (www.thebanker.com) this leads straight into a second integral point of interest for Barclays. The need to place major investments into the most modern and efficient IT systems available that enables top of the line business transactions to transpire unhinged. IT will allow up to date information to be at the fingertips of Barclay’s managers, giving managers a huge advantage when it comes to making decisions and in pin pointing groups of customers that can have a high added value to Barclays. The fine-tuning of IT will also eliminate weaknesses within Barclays practices, preventing failures that effect customers and thus reducing excessive and unnecessary costs.(thebanker.com)