Barclays probably wanted the focus this week to be on its new investment bank management team led by JF Astier and John Miller. The announcement on Tuesday was brimming with promotions, including those of Kristin Roth DeClark and Taylor Wright, who have become global co-heads of capital markets.
But then came prominent departures from the bank in London and New York. Charlotte Weir, the bank’s head of corporate debt capital markets EMEA, recently accepted a position in corporate banking at Wells Fargo, which is in the process of building a DCM-focused team in the region. In New York, Melissa Mariaschin has been lured away from her equity syndicate job to join former colleagues Angus Whelchel and Steven Halperin at Moelis & Company.
Other recent departures from Barclays include investment bankers Daniel Ross, who has gone to Deutsche Bank to be head of investment banking for the UK and Ireland, and Mike Lamb, who is joining Citi as chairman of insurance investment banking.
One headhunter suggested that the concentration of decision making power in New York may be hampering managers in London who would like to do more to try to retain staff who have an offer elsewhere. It is indeed striking that the newly created management team for the investment bank is entirely based in the US.
But a banker who recently left the firm thought that the high turnover was more a symptom of a broader restlessness that was pervading investment banking and the capital markets in the wake of the pandemic.
“I’m not sure it’s a Barclays thing,” said the ex-Barclays banker. “There are just a lot of people who are re-evaluating what they’re doing and thinking about whether they are at the right firm for them.”
“The irony is that everybody working from home means it’s an awful lot easier to interview for a new job than it ever was, where you had to make excuses about where you were going and stuff like that,” the banker added. “I feel like there’s a shift in the industry generally which is that people are looking to move in a more active way.”
The numbers seem to bear this view out. Since the beginning of April, GlobalCapital has reported 11 bankers leaving Barclays for positions elsewhere but 13 going the other way, representing a net headcount gain for Barclays of two.
The recent arrivals include new head of Nordic banking Tobias Akermark, who was hired from Morgan Stanley; Bronson Albery, whom Barclays poached from JP Morgan as head of real estate for Europe and the Middle East; and in Germany Ingrid Hengster from the board of KfW and Anthony Samengo-Turner from Greenhill & Co.
Barclays also made another big internal appointment in the past week, naming Pier Luigi Colizzi head of investment banking for continental Europe. The position had been vacant since January, when Carlo Calabria left to concentrate on a special purpose acquisition company and relaunch his boutique investment bank, CMC Capital.
Non-Barclays news
And in Switzerland, JP Morgan has recruited UBS’s head of global banking for the country, Reinout Böttcher, to a vice-chair position. UBS has taken the departure as an opportunity to promote Philipp Beck.
