Another £900m set aside to compensate customers who were missold payment protection insurance and a near 50 per cent decline in earnings within Barclays’ “repositioned” investment bank, according to FastFT.
Not exactly the headlines chief executive Antony Jenkins will be looking forward to discussing with the media later today.
The British bank on Wednesday reported that adjusted group pre-tax fell by 7 per cent in the first half of the year, to £3.3bn, as stronger performances from its retail and Barclaycard businesses couldn’t offset declining profitability and revenues in its investment bank, particularly in its once heavyweight fixed income division.
Across the unit’s markets division, revenue slipped 22 per cent, and an even steeper 35 per cent in its “Macro” business, which includes rates, currencies and commodities trading income, during the period.
“Performance in the investment bank was impacted by the repositioning underway as well as difficult trading conditions in the quarter, but it is where we expected it to be at this point,” Mr Jenkins said.
Barclays announced plans to radically scale back its investment banking division earlier this year, cutting 7,000 jobs and moving half the unit’s assets into a so-called “bad bank,” in a formal retreat from the era when the group was led by flamboyant American Bob Diamond.
But every time Mr Jenkins tries to draw a line under Barclays’ scandal-ridden recent history, a new regulatory issue, or an old one, such as PPI, seems to crop back up.
Late last month, New York’s top securities regulator sued the bank for allegedly favouring high-speed traders using its “dark pool” trading venue, while misleading institutional investors - allegations Barclays is contesting.
After Wall Street’s leading investment banks generally reported a less bad than feared performance from their own fixed income divisions in the second quarter, Deutsche Bank - one of Europe’s dominant debt trading banks - set a higher bar on Tuesday in actually matching its revenues from the second quarter of 2013.
Barclays’ move to take an axe to its own fixed income franchise saw the investment bank’s pre-tax profit slump to £1.1bn for the first half, down from £2bn in the first half of 2013.
