Barclays is set to expand its private banking and wealth management arm by hiring up to 100 advisers. This recruitment push focuses on bolstering key hubs, including London, Geneva, Dubai, and India, but ruled out the US.
The hires will include relationship managers and operational staff to support service delivery as part of a renewed strategy by Barclays to increase profitability. The new hires will bolster its capabilities in investment management, estate planning, and bespoke financial services.
In a speech to analysts this week, Sasha Wiggins, chief executive of Barclays Private Bank and Wealth Management, said the bank was targeting the about four million Barclays UK customers with investable assets worth £250,000 to £3 million.
‘The UK is a large market with client investable assets totalling some 3.5 trillion pounds ($4.45 trillion), split across digital investing, affluent and private banking segments’, Wiggins said.
‘It’s a significant opportunity, both for the individual but also for the economy,’ she added.
[See also: The Spear’s Power List 2024: Who made the cut?]
Barclays is the latest major international bank to turbo-charge its wealth management division to compete for the growing market of high-net-worth individuals.
Content from our partners
HSBC announced in September that it was growing its team of wealth advisers and relationship managers in a bid to secure its place among the biggest UK wealth managers. The recruitment drive by Europe’s biggest bank is part of ambitions by the bank to double its assets under management to £100 billion ($131 billion) by leveraging its global footprint.
Besides the UK, Wiggins said Barclays was chasing market share in Singapore, India and the Middle East, but the United States was ‘not a priority’ due to high costs and competition.
[See also: The best wealth managers for ultra-high-net-worth clients in 2024]
Alongside the recruitment drive, Wiggins said Barclays would also increase its annual technology spending by more than 75 per cent. A PwC’s 2024 Global Investor Survey released last week found companies faced mounting pressure from investors to deliver measurable outcomes from artificial intelligence (AI) while maintaining strong investments in their workforce.
Wiggins ruled out any acquisitions to accelerate growth, saying it would be organic. ‘This year alone, we’ve grown our net new assets under management by £3 billion, around double the growth we saw for the equivalent period last year,’ she said in a presentation in London on Tuesday.
The bank has set targets to deliver an annual return on tangible equity of more than 25 per cent by 2026.
