Institutions
Barclays provides financial services for a wide range of institutional clients, from charities and universities through to financial clients such as hedge funds, pension funds, insurers and international banks.
Case studies
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Barclays Capital was mandated by a large German insurance company to develop a commodity-focused investment product for distribution. The request was the first time this premier client had outsourced management of a key product to a third party, demonstrating the strength of the relationship.
The CORALS Index (Commodities Out-performance Roll Adjusted Liquid Strategy Index) is designed to capture a risk-adjusted measure of the active return on an investment, known as alpha, from commodity markets.
Growth in the commodity markets has generated unprecedented investor interest. Demand has been fuelled by rapid expansion in emerging economies, driven by aggressive urbanisation and industrialisation. The CORALS Index provides investors with an opportunity to extract positive returns in differing market cycles, including stagnant or falling markets, -
Customer centricity is often seen as being applied to our retail banking customers, but is equally true for institutional clients across our investment banking and investment management businesses.
A good example is our approach to Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), the wealth reserves of nations in budget surplus. SWFs have a multitude of needs, from day-to-day trading to professional out-sourced asset management, and in some circumstances, private wealth management for associated individuals. All of these products and services can be provided by different parts of the Barclays Group.
In order to better address the needs of this unique customer base, we launched our SWF initiative in early 2008 to ensure a tailored service offering for each individual client jointly from Barclays Capital, Barclays Global Investors and Barclays Wealth. Our collective understanding of the clients’ situation and needs results in the best of investment banking and investment management products and services being delivered to them. -
Barclays Capital managed the European Investment Bank’s first international Zambian kwacha (the country’s local currency) bond in 2008, working with bank WestLB, and drawing on resources from Barclays Zambia and Absa Capital, a South African-based financial services company affiliated with Barclays Capital.
The issue for ZMK 125bn (approximately £17.2m) carries an annual coupon of 12.25 per cent and has an issue price of 100 per cent.
The bond follows recent initiatives by the European Investment Bank in African currencies in the international capital markets – in Botswanan pula, Egyptian pound, Ghanaian cedi, Mauritian rupee and Namibian dollar. EIB has also issued in South African rand for more than ten years. -
Recognising that his team was spending a disproportionate amount of time dealing with invoices, purchase orders and other paperwork, Liverpool University’s Director of Procurement market-tested a range of purchasing cards and found the Barclaycard Business Purchasing Card best suited the university’s needs.
Following a pilot run, the team initiated a gradual roll-out of the purchasing card scheme. Now the number of cardholders has increased to more than 270, and in the last financial year the university initiated 29,000 transactions on the cards, with a total value of more than £4m.
Senior Procurement Manager David Johnson says the benefits of using the Barclaycard Business Purchasing Card are numerous. “Instead of writing out purchase orders, sending them to our finance department for authorisation and posting them to our suppliers, a member of staff with a purchasing card can simply go to a secure website or order over the phone there and then.”
