Barclays may restart ECM business in India soon

Mumbai: Barclays Plc is in advanced preparations to restart the equity capital market (ECM) business in India, ten years after the London-headquartered bank shut down its ECM and allied broking and research divisions as part of an Asia-wide purge, said people familiar with the development.

The bank is scouting for senior executives to start operations as it wants to take a larger wallet share of corpo rate clients for whom it does debt and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory currently, the people said, adding that the new vertical could be up and running in the next few months.

“It is now an open evaluation and a decision will be made in the next couple of months. The logic is to get a higher share of client wallets which continue to be serviced in India. The bank has an established business on the debt side and M&A with a lot of large clients. It makes sense to expand in this side of the business to deepen the franchise and gain market share,” said one of the persons, who did not wish to be identified.

A Barclays spokesperson declined to comment in response to ET’s queries. In January 2016, Barclays had discontinued the ECM business in India as part of a reduction in operations in nine markets, mostly in Asia, including India. The move was part of then CEO Jes Staley’s plans to reduce operations in markets where the bank was uncompetitive, in an attempt to conserve capital.

In India the bank had discontinued ECM, broking and research operations, cutting about 25 jobs, ET had reported then. Full bank operations were shut in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

The renewed push to start ECM operations in India is aimed at ensuring that the bank offers a full bouquet of products to its clients in India. The bank services only corporate clients in the country. “When the ECM business was running in India the bank was doing well. ECM was still profitable. It suffered collateral damage because the bank decided to shut down the business in Asia, mainly because China was a difficult market to make it. This is now a fresh start,” said a second person.