Intent on becoming one of the world's premier wealth management firms, Barclays Wealth now has 120 advisor teams and 250 client-interfacing staff in the Americas.
Barclays has been quietly revamping the fallen Lehman Brothers Private Investment Management Business, which it acquired in September 2008. Prior to the sale, Barclays had scant representation in the United States.
"[Lehman] brought a lot to the table. There was almost no overlap," a Barclays source says.
The extensive restructuring focuses on providing custom-tailored, holistic wealth management services for ultra-high-net-worth clients with at least $10 million in investable assets. The firm has an open-architecture platform of investment managers and products.
Following the December 2009 merger of BlackRock and Barclays Global lnvestors, including the latter's market-leading iShares ETF business, Barclays maintains a 19.9 percent stake in the combined firm. But the Barclays source insists that its advisors are not placing particular emphasis on ETFs.
"The conclusion that we sell a lot of that would be inaccurate because this business was previously Lehman Brothers' high-net-worth investment management business," the source said.
One ETF-based product now rolling out is Barclays Wealth ETF Tactical Allocation (BETA) Portfolios for active and automatic rebalancing, and management. Four portfolios use a moderately conservative asset allocation strategy; the other four, a moderately aggressive strategy. BETA can be adapted for small portfolios as well as for a core/satellite approach.
