Top Barclays rates salesman moves to Wells Fargo

Barclays has lost one of its most senior rates salesman in London. He has resurfaced at Wells Fargo – one of the few banks still talking up a UK expansion.

Daniel Wrobel, who worked at Barclays for 12 and a half years, has just joined Wells Fargo as a managing director and head of rates for EMEA.

Wrobel was previously co-head of distribution for Germany and Austria at Barclays, based out of London. He joined the bank in September 2004, from Credit Suisse where he was a vice president.

Wells Fargo is still expanding its London operations in the wake of the Brexit vote. It signed a deal for a new £300m London headquarters in July last year. This has room for 2,600 people and Wells currently employs around 850 people in the UK.

Barclays, meanwhile, has been shrinking. Not only has it continued to enforce a long-held hiring freeze over the past year, at the end of 2016 it said that it would cut 5,000 desks - or 25% of its London office as it reduces its UK footprint.

Senior markets staff have been departing in recent weeks. For example, Neal Hallett, its head of EMEA cash equities, left earlier this month and Bruce Phelps, a long-serving senior equity researcher, moved to the buy-side in January.

Barclays’ investment bank has traditionally been more skewed towards fixed income trading, but for the first nine months of 2016 this reliance on FICC was reduced. It now generates 46% of its revenues from FICC, compared to 61% at Deutsche Bank – another fixed income powerhouse.

In the first half of this year, CEO Jes Staley made a presentation suggesting that Barclays was seriously outperforming its peers in FICC - even before Brexit and Trump's election - and that it's top-ranked in a lot of different fixed income sectors. Rates was absent from this, however.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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