Barclays has been quietly revamping the fallen Lehman Brothers Private Investment Management Business, which it acquired in September 2008. Prior to the sale, Barclays had scant representation in the United States.
"[Lehman] brought a lot to the table. There was almost no overlap," a Barclays source says.
The extensive restructuring focuses on providing custom-tailored, holistic wealth management services for ultra-high-net-worth clients with at least $10 million in investable assets. The firm has an open-architecture platform of investment managers and products.
Following the December 2009 merger of BlackRock and Barclays Global lnvestors, including the latter's market-leading iShares ETF business, Barclays maintains a 19.9 percent stake in the combined firm. But the Barclays source insists that its advisors are not placing particular emphasis on ETFs.
"The conclusion that we sell a lot of that would be inaccurate because this business was previously Lehman Brothers' high-net-worth investment management business," the source said.
One ETF-based product now rolling out is Barclays Wealth ETF Tactical Allocation (BETA) Portfolios for active and automatic rebalancing, and management. Four portfolios use a moderately conservative asset allocation strategy; the other four, a moderately aggressive strategy. BETA can be adapted for small portfolios as well as for a core/satellite approach.
Since last July, managing director Mitch Cox, head of the global investment & product office, has been at the helm of the vigorous build-out. Previously he was with Merrill Lynch for 12 years and before that, the private bank of the Bankers Trust Company.
Announcing the appointment of Cox, a former Skadden Arps attorney, Barclays Wealth CEO Thomas L. Kalaris noted Cox's "excellent track record in building and managing private client businesses" during a 20-year career.
Cox has been hiring top producers and branch managers previously with firms such as Goldman Sachs, Oppenheimer & Co., Radnor Trust Co. and UBS Financial Services. Barclays now has 12 U.S. offices and a branch in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Last month, the firm hired a regional manager -- Linda Willis Eydt, formerly with UBS -- to grow its Southeast business. She is based in Atlanta.
The exhaustive Barclays expansion also includes signing on Anthony Valvo last month as a director and head of credit structuring to build the firm's Americas banking platform for the super-affluent clientele to which it caters. Valvo joined from Citigroup.
Last March, Barclays brought on board Maureen Clancy and Natalia Tchetchoulina, both previously BNY Mellon relationship-management executives working with family office clients.
Also on board at Barclays is Carmen Menendez-Puerto, head of AML Compliance. Her prior post was leading the global anti-money laundering program at Citigroup. AML compliance programs, also known as financial crime programs, are required by the Patriot Act of 2001, which takes a stricter approach to the flow of money into and out of the U.S. than did laws in the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.
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