Barclays wins the award as the UK’s best investment bank. Even though some investors had to wait for the bank’s investor day in February 2024 to hear it once again reaffirm its commitment to the investment bank, staff in the UK had no doubt of this.
AfE 2024
The difficulty was that 2023 was the worst year in UK investment banking that anyone can remember. However, Barclays topped the UK investment banking revenue ranking, with an 8% share, ahead of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs each with 6.9%.
In the volumes rankings, it came top in debt capital markets, third in loans, fourth in M&A and sixth in equity capital markets. That is a better performance across the board than any rival including even the big US firms.
The bank has always had a standout DCM franchise in the UK. As it strives for the same in M&A and ECM, there were some notable deals.
Barclays was financial adviser and sole sponsor to Harbour Energy on its $11.2 billion acquisition of Wintershall Dea’s non-Russian connected upstream assets. The acquisition is expected to transform Harbour into one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse independent oil and gas companies, but now with increased reserve life and improved margins, as well as lower greenhouse gas intensity. The deal advances Harbour’s energy transition by shifting its portfolio towards natural gas.
In ECM, Barclays was the only bank to act as global coordinator on all three monetizations by the Thomson Reuters and Blackstone consortium in the London Stock Exchange Group in 2023, which in total represented £6.7 billion of accelerated bookbuild issuance and over a third of total volumes in the UK.