US: Barclays sells indexing division to Bloomberg for $781 million

Barclays agreed to sell the indexing business built around former Lehman Brothers benchmarks to Bloomberg LP for about $781 million, as Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley speeds up disposals of unwanted assets.

Barclays said it will post a 480 million-pound gain from selling the risk analytics and index solutions business, boosting its regulatory capital level by 0.1 percentage point, according to a statement Wednesday from the London-based bank. The deal needs antitrust approval and should be completed “mid-2016,” Barclays said. Bloomberg LP is the parent company of Bloomberg News.

The bank’s indexes, such as the Global Aggregate, are widely used as corporate bond benchmarks by portfolio managers. Much of the business was acquired in 2008, when Barclays absorbed Lehman Brothers Holdings North American unit. Staley, a 58-year-old veteran of JPMorgan Chase, was hired by Chairman John McFarlane in October to accelerate the bank’s restructuring and refocus on its most profitable British and US businesses.

Full content: The Wall Street Journal

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