Barclays is building a new equities sales desk

Barclays has been building out its equities team for nearly four years now, as it looks to position itself as a major player in the sector, but it’s not finished yet. It’s set to launch a new equities sales team to manage hundreds of new accounts in an attempt to boost its market share.

Michael Henderson, formerly a director in equity sales at Morgan Stanley, joined Barclays’ investment bank in November to establish and lead a new equity sales team in London, according to sources close to the situation. It will be known as the Single Touch Equity Product (STEP) and it’s part of Henderson’s role to build a new sales team from scratch.

The team will be pitching for business among the hundreds of so-called ‘non-tiered’ customers – namely, smaller or new clients or customers that don’t have a minimum spend with the bank – with the aim of bolstering secondary cash equities revenue. Most investment banks have a similar function, but this is a new venture for Barclays.

Barclays declined to comment on either Henderson’s appointment or the new equity sales desk.

The bank has essentially been building a cash equities team in Europe from nothing since 2009, having embarked on an aggressive recruitment spree until late 2011. In the U.S., it became a major equities house overnight after paying $1.85bn for Lehman’s North American business in 2008.

Its equities and prime services business brought in £2.2bn for the first nine months of 2013, a 26% increase on 2012, and rose by 23% to £645m in Q3. However, this follows an improvement in equities revenues across the investment banking industry.

Barclays now ranks fifth for global equity market share, with 6.4% of the market, according to JPMorgan analyst estimates.