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Barclays is a big bank that takes deposits, lends money, runs credit cards, and helps companies raise money and trade.
Barclays is one of Britain's oldest and largest banks, and it does two big jobs under one roof. For ordinary people, it's a place to keep a checking account, get a mortgage, and carry a credit card. For big companies and investors, it's a dealmaker and a trading house — the kind of firm that helps a business borrow money, sell shares to the public, or shuffle billions of dollars around the world each day.
The retail side is the simpler half. Barclays runs branches and a mobile app in the UK, takes customer deposits, and lends that money back out as mortgages, personal loans, and credit cards. The bank makes money on the gap between what it pays savers and what it charges borrowers, plus fees and interest on card balances. That business is steady but crowded, so scale and low-cost technology matter more than flashy products. The other half is Barclays' investment bank, which is where the real drama lives. It trades stocks, bonds, and currencies, advises on mergers, and underwrites new debt and share sales for corporations and governments. This is a global, competitive arena where Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and European rivals like Deutsche Bank fight for the same deals. Barclays has long been a major player in fixed-income trading, in particular, and that desk's fortunes can swing the whole company's results.
In London in 1690, John Freame and Thomas Gould set themselves up as goldsmith bankers on Lombard Street. In those days goldsmiths kept people's gold safe and lent it out, which made them bankers in all but name. Their real edge was trust: through Quaker connections they financed Quaker traders doing business in the American and Caribbean colonies, and the business grew. In the 1730s the Barclay family joined the firm, and by 1736 the name Barclays was tied to the business for good.
By 1896, many small London banks were too small to compete on their own, so they banded together under the Barclays name. The biggest piece was the Gurney business, a large country bank. That union created the branch network that still sits at the heart of modern Barclays.
In 1966 Barclays launched Barclaycard, the first credit card in the UK, letting people buy now and pay later. A year later it put the world's first cash machine in Enfield, so people could get money without a teller. These were bets that ordinary people, not just the rich, wanted convenient banking, and they made Barclays a pioneer in consumer banking technology.
In 1985 Barclays reorganized itself as a holding company, moving all its assets into an operating subsidiary. The old Barclays Bank plc became the group holding company, renamed Barclays plc, and UK retail banking was brought together under Barclays Bank PLC. In plain terms, it built a clean corporate roof to sit over a growing pile of businesses.
The next year, 1986, brought the Big Bang, a deregulation of the London Stock Exchange that blew open the old rules of trading. Barclays grabbed the chance and bought de Zoete & Bevan and Wedd Durlacher to form BZW, its new investment banking division. For the first time, Barclays had a serious presence in the world of big corporate deals and trading.
Then, in 1998, a "black hole" turned up in the accounts of BZW, the investment bank Barclays had built with such hope. A black hole, put simply, means losses or gaps that nobody had properly seen or counted. Barclays broke BZW up and sold parts of it to Credit Suisse First Boston, keeping the debt business, which became the seed of Barclays Capital.
In 2000 Barclays bought Woolwich plc, once a building society, which brought a bigger mortgage and savings business. Woolwich's management, including John Stewart, came along into Barclays' executive team. It was a straightforward move to deepen Barclays' grip on everyday UK banking.
In 2005 Barclays paid £2.6bn for a controlling stake in Absa Group Limited, South Africa's largest retail bank, taking 54% of it. The deal planted Barclays firmly in Africa, adding a fast-growing region to its map.
In 2007 Barclays set its sights on ABN AMRO, the largest bank in the Netherlands, in what would have been a huge merger. But that October Barclays walked away, saying ABN shareholders had not backed the deal. That left a rival consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland free to push ahead with its own counter-bid.
When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and the financial world shook, Barclays stepped in to buy Lehman's US business. The deal was overseen by Robert E. Diamond Jr., who ran the investment banking arm, and it gave Barclays a much bigger footing in American investment banking.
In 2012 Bob Diamond stepped down as chief executive in July amid the LIBOR scandal, in which banks were found to have rigged a key interest rate. It came after a run of regulatory and reputational crises. Antony Jenkins took over, with the job of transforming Barclays and repairing its name.
In November 2021 C.S. Venkatakrishnan became CEO, at a time when the bank's shares traded at about half its book value, meaning investors valued it at roughly half of what its own accounts said it was worth. Four months in, the bank found it had over-issued hundreds of millions of dollars of unregistered securities in the United States. He kept running the bank through cancer treatment and went on to engineer a major restructuring.
Venkat split Barclays into five separately reported divisions: UK retail, UK corporate, private banking and wealth, the investment bank, and US consumer. He moved £30 billion of risk-weighted assets, the money a bank must hold against its loans, back into UK lending, and bought Tesco Bank for UK consumer scale and GoHenry for youth banking. In other words, he tilted the bank back toward the UK and toward everyday customers.
In 2026 Barclays said it would cut around 5,000 full-time jobs, about 5% of its workforce, as part of an AI-driven push for cost savings. It expects more than £1.1 billion of gross efficiency savings in fiscal 2027. The same quarter, profit before tax rose 12% to £2.32 billion, and the bank announced a £500 million share buyback.
Barclays has also been through serious mess. In 2012 it was fined for rigging the LIBOR interest rate, a scandal that cost its boss his job and badly bruised its reputation. More recently, a 2023 trading error in the US forced it to sell securities at a loss, and it has been trimming costs and jobs while pushing to grow its UK retail and credit card businesses. The bank also buys back shares and pays dividends, returning spare cash to owners. Its key vulnerability is simple: lending is a leveraged business, so a sharp economic downturn hurts on both the loan side and the trading floor at once.
Saved answer · last researched 27 Oct 2026