Barclays’ newest MD might be the most important of them all
There are a lot of boring parts of finance. Everyone is interested in investment banking or trading, but some of the most important work goes on behind the scenes.
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Barclays, with its ambitious investment bank targets, is a good example: the bank picked up Liz Padley as a managing director (MD) and head of capital and leverage management in London earlier this month.
Padley spent seven years at Lloyds before joining Barclays, and was most recently an MD in Lloyd’s capital and term funding’s team. She was the UK bank's head of capital and recovery and resolution before that.
Padley’s capital management role is crucial for Barclays’ corporate and investment bank (CIB). Barclays wants to reduce the share of risk-weighted assets that the CIB employs. The CIB's RAW share was 63% in 2023; Barclays wants to get that number to around 50% by 2026, with the excess going to higher-returning corporate, consumer, and private banking units.
Barclay’s overreliance on debt capital markets (DCM) will also be part of that change. The bank’s investment banking deep dive from last week showed that 54% of investment banking revenue came from DCM in H1 on average between 2019 and 2024; the equivalent figure at the Top 5 US banks was just 38%. The bank is already on track to change that, moving up the league tables for this year for both M&A and ECM performance.
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