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Bloomberg
Barclays Plc’s Jes Staley promised more buybacks and dividends to shareholders as the bank’s traders outperformed most of their Wall Street and European peers.
Fourth-quarter income at the London-based firm’s markets unit fell 2.5 percent from a year earlier to 945 million pounds ($1.2 billion), a performance that beat many of the bank’s rivals. While the last quarter of the year is usually weak, trading revenues fell less than the 6.7 percent average decline posted by the five biggest US banks in the quarter, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
“Every quarter we gained market share — we had the strongest performance of any of our competitors on the year, so we feel great about that,†Staley, the bank’s 62-year-old chief
executive officer, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
The shares rose as much as 5.1 percent, the most in almost a year. The trading performance — and the rallying stock — give Staley more ammunition as he pushes back against Edward Bramson, the activist shareholder who amassed a stake of more than 5 percent in the bank.
American-born Staley, who spent over 30 years at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, aims to take on the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., while Bramson would rather he curtailed those ambitions.
Despite last quarter’s outperformance versus rivals, the corporate and investment bank posted a negative return on tangible equity of 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter, the worst result among divisions at the bank.
The bank took 150 million pounds in provisions for economic uncertainty related to Brexit, of which 100 million pounds was booked at its UK unit.
Barclays also took a 140-million-pound provision related to pensions.
The bank said its dividends will be progressive, supplemented by buybacks, “as and when appropriate.†A share buyback would be the first since Staley took over as CEO in 2015, and the lender recently published average analyst estimates for its buybacks for the first time.