Those wishing to take a little lustre off Barclays Capital’s shiny success in the past few years have pointed habitually to the constraints of its debt-focused model. When the debt party is over, detractors say, the firm’s business mix will not look quite so clever. John Winter, BarCap’s urbane head of European investment banking and debt capital markets, gives that slur very short shrift. “The so-called debt party is pretty much over – just look at the decline in corporate bond issuance – yet our business is still booming. We just keep finding different opportunities; different ways to leverage what we have to offer,” he says.
Some of the key things BarCap has to offer, says Mr Winter, are the synergies that exist between the bank’s business lines, combined with the relationships and balance sheet of the corporate bank underlying them. “Building our business successfully has been based on organising the bank’s operations in a constructive and creative way, and capitalising on synergies between product and client groups. The ability to really leverage the entire bank is driving a lot of opportunities,” he says.
