Barclays would not comment on a report in the Financial Times about the selection of Staley for the role, which would require approval from regulators.
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“The process of appointing a new group chief executive officer has not yet concluded and Barclays will provide a further update once that is complete”, Barclays said Tuesday.
To many in the United Kingdom establishment, Mr Diamond was also guilty of running a bank whilst American.
His replacement, British retail banker Antony Jenkins, was ousted in July.
In an interview with the Financial Times published over the weekend, the chairman also said he’s anxious that investment banks are losing ground to strong competitors across the Atlantic. At his last job as chair of Aviva PLC Mr. McFarlane used the same playbook-firing the CEO and taking executive control of the British insurer.
Staley left JP Morgan in 2013 after 34 years, where he had been seen as a potential successor to Jamie Dimon, to join BlueMountain Capital.
Chirantan Barua, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd.in London with a market perform rating on the shares, said Staley may have to raise capital to boost the investment bank.
Mr Ahmed noted that the move indicates the bank would be keeping its investment focus. Bob Diamond, Mr Jenkins’s predecessor, ran the lender’s investment banking operations before becoming chief executive in 2011.
The second option was to go in a different direction and find a chief executive who could prove to politicians and regulators that Barclays had changed and was now focusing on simpler, retail banking.
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McFarlane has pledged to step up the pace of his overhaul and press on with cost cuts and divestitures to bolster earnings. In the 1980s he worked in the firm’s Latin America division and later helped establish J.P. Morgan’s equities business. Staley would be a return to the Barclays we knew and hated/loved (delete as appropriate) – aggressive, expansive, dangerous.
