Barclays prevails over US rivals in prime brokerage

London — Barclays is winning business from its top Wall Street rivals in prime brokerage, a lucrative investment banking battleground where lenders are battling to serve hedge funds in an array of increasingly complex trades.

The British bank has risen to fifth in the revenue table for prime broking for the year to the end of June, from about seventh five years ago, according to data seen by Reuters from research firm BCG Expand.

A second provider, who did not want to be named discussing sensitive client data, confirmed the fifth place ranking.

The achievement comes as CEO CS Venkatakrishnan prepares to unveil half-year results on August 1.

Barclays’ investment banking performance is in sharp focus, amid the fear a decision to shift risk to other businesses could hobble the unit’s ability to compete.

Mike Webb, global head of liquid financing at Barclays, told Reuters his team was now a genuine “disrupter” of the prime brokerage business.

Webb said the British lender’s differentiation came from investment in its digital platform, and an offering that combined fixed income and equities products where rivals tended to split them, a model that had taken eight years to perfect.

“We think we are the most integrated financing provider on the Street,” he said.

“The large multi-strategy fund can come to us and have a singular conversation about government bond repo, credit, futures.... At other banks, it’s a fixed-income conversation and an equities conversation,” Webb told Reuters in an interview.

Prime brokerage, in which banks offer hedge funds services, including financing, securities lending, custody and trade execution, is worth about $20bn a year in revenues to banks, according to research firm Coalition Greenwich.

That has risen from $15bn in 2020, the data showed, despite a relatively mature industry in which new entrants are relatively scarce.

But the wallet was expanding, Webb said, because clients were demanding more sophisticated services.

“A prime business brings stable, repeatable, consistent, high returning client-centric revenue and returns to the table,” Webb said.

Barclays had grown the business at a 6% compound annual growth rate since 2016, Webb said, and was targeting a high single-digit rate from here on.

Mollie Devine, head of markets competitor analytics at Coalition Greenwich, said prime brokerage was the hottest battleground in global banks’ equities businesses, particularly since a deal making slump has crushed advisory fees.

“A number of banks have solved different equations and ended up with prime as the place they wanted to invest within equities,” she said.

Moving further up the ranking will be a tough ask for Barclays.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley dominate the industry, holding a market share of nearly 50% in prime with nearly $1-trillion in client balances apiece, according to Amrit Shahani, partner at research firm BCG Expand.

US rivals, including Citigroup and Bank of America, as well as Europeans, such as BNP Paribas, which in 2019 acquired Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage business, are also trying to grow their business.

Barclays’ push into prime services is not without risk.

Taking on bigger clients with increasingly sophisticated trading ambitions is not a sure-fire route to profit, with Credit Suisse’s troubles with failed private investment firm Archegos still fresh in the memory.

The competition had also intensified further since Credit Suisse’s demise, said George Evans, president and co-founder of research firm Convergence Inc.

“There are close to 300 named prime brokers in SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] filings and that’s the same as around 12 years ago when we started,” he said.

Prime broking is attractive to banks because unlike deal making or trading, it provides a steady and predictable stream of revenue, Evans said.

Barclays, a client of Convergence, had grown its business by being extremely focused on which funds to target, Evans added.

The bank added 69 fund relationships in the year to March 2024, according to previously unreported Convergence data, placing the bank ninth in prime broker rankings by total number of clients.

According to Barclays’ Webb, the discrepancy in position between revenue and the number of clients exists because Barclays has targeted bigger, more global funds with more complex requirements.

“They are burning calories on the right names in the market,” Convergence’s Evans said.

Reuters