Mr. Staley was close to being named chief executive, but Barclays balked at the public relations impact of having to buy him out of his deferred compensation at J.P. Morgan, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Staley’s appointment could be confirmed within two weeks, after it gets an approval from regulators, the Financial Times reported.
Staley is now managing partner of BlueMountain Capital Management, a US-based hedge fund firm.
Shortly before Staley joined BlueMountain it had made a fortune from betting against gambles taken by the London Whale trader – which resulted in £4billion of losses for JPMorgan.
Investors and analysts said Staley should improve morale and set a clear strategy for the investment bank after years of uncertainty, but they warned he should not build it back up aggressively. The bank has a less than stellar (still above regulatory minimums, however) common equity tier one ratio, at 11.1% as of second quarter 2015, and a leverage ratio of 4.1%.
One person who attended the briefing – which followed a similar event in New York ten days ago – told Sky News they were surprised by his openness about the search.
Mr Jenkins was appointed in 2012 as Barclays began toning down its exposure to investment banking to return to its retail banking roots, in an attempt to fix its reputation in the wake of the Libor-fixing scandal.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts on 27 December 1956, and educated at small liberal arts specialist Bowdoin College, James E Staley earned his reputation as an investment banker during a 30-year career at JP Morgan, including a stint in Brazil.
“Alongside Tom King, the existing American chief executive of Barclays” investment bank, his appointment confirms the dominance of U.S. investment bankers at Barclays.
John McFarlane is now acting as interim chief executive.
The man holding the sawn-off shotgun was Lord King, then the governor of the Bank of England, who had come to the end of his limited patience with a man who had a big smile, a multi-million pound remuneration package and ran a bank that had just admitted manipulating global interest rates to its own advantage. Staley was a “strong operator at JPMorgan” and the focus at Barclays will be on raising profitability, Chubak said. Jenkins’ style of functioning created a rift with the board in measures aimed at making the bank turn around.
But a few other analysts say that while the Barclays stock is down more than other banking shares, investors need to realise that the whole sector is down overall.
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The current plan for the division, engineered by investment bank head Tom King and other senior staff such as Finance Director Tushar Morzaria, involves stripping out costs by cutting and outsourcing jobs, reducing low-returning assets and getting a better grip on capital allocation.
