Barclays Capital, the investment banking division of Barclays, is adding to its equity derivatives team across three continents with up to 15 hires in a bid to enhance its structuring, trading and distribution network.

Barclays’ announcement last month that it had agreed to outsource cash management services for its larger UK corporate clients to Deutsche Bank is remarkable. Maintaining account services, domestic and international payments and collections, liquidity management and electronic banking are bread-and-butter banking activities. The provision of such unglamorous but vital services is an essential part of the cement that binds corporate customers to their relationship banks. So it can’t have been easy for Barclays to admit that its customers would be better off using Deutsche’s products and services than its own.

Barclays and Deutsche Bank have joined forces to launch a pan-European cash management service for large corporates called 'Barclays Euro Treasurer'.

Barclays Capital has appointed Guglielmo Sartori di Borgoricco as a managing director and head of European distribution. He joins the investment banking division of Barclays Bank in April and will work out of the London office.

Barclays Capital was the first bank to build a trading system, which it has rolled out via Bloomberg, and which caters for both the bank and the customer market. The bank has found an ingenious way to get around the principal obstruction to launching online swaps trading, which is how to check your credit line with a counterparty. It integrates the system with clients’ back offices, so that it knows automatically what their credit limit is to a particular client, and if the client is about to breach it.

Barclays' appointment of investment banker Bob Diamond as chairman of Barclays Global Investors last summer indicated the group's commitment to fund management. But can BGI, which only contributes a fraction of Barclays' profits, gain the recognition it wants?