Barclays chief under pressure to win over sceptics with strategy update

Barclays chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan will next week attempt to fulfil a promise his predecessor made to shareholders eight years ago: that a future with the UK bank is a bright one.

The lender, the last European player of any size on Wall Street, will on Tuesday deliver its first major update on strategy since March 2016, when the questions it faced were eerily similar. Then, the board had just fired a chief executive who wanted to cut the investment bank to the bone and installed Jes Staley.

Staley, an acolyte of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan, did the opposite, retreating from Barclays’ centuries-old presence in Africa and shutting much of its Asia operations in order to build a “bulge-bracket, transatlantic investment bank”.

The intervening years have seen a vast expansion of the trading division, with the investment bank capturing significant market share amid the retreat or demise of its main European rivals.

Yet investors remain unimpressed. Barclays shares closed at 147 pence on Friday, down from the 158p when Staley delivered his strategy update.

“Eight years is a long time in corporate life, especially for a period hardly notable for its success,” said one former executive at the bank.

The moribund share price performance underlines the high stakes for CEO CS Venkatakrishnan — known as Venkat — who must convince sceptics of the value of a business model largely unchanged from the one he inherited from his mentor Staley. 

The 58-year-old, who was treated for cancer last year, must do so against the distracting backdrop of Staley fighting a lifetime ban from financial services in the UK after regulators said he misled them over his relationship with deceased paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

Barclays has resolved not to cave to critics who want to see the volatile and low-returning investment bank shrunk. Instead, Venkat will outline plans to grow other divisions such as the UK retail business, take more risk in credit cards and boost wealth…