Barclays Names Jes Staley As New CEO

In a formal announcement ending a few weeks of speculation, Barclays PLC has named James Staley, more colloquially known as Jes, as its chief executive officer.

The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday (Oct. 28) that the newly installed executive is tasked with making Barclays’ investment bank more profitable. He will join in his official capacity on Dec. 1. And in a letter to his employees, Staley said he would look to improve shareholder returns, with an eye on the “repositioning of the investment bank to a less capital-intensive model.”

As a compensation package, Barclays has said Staley will get a total of roughly $12.6 million annually, which includes salary and other awards. This year the company will grant him £1.9 million in Barclays stock worth a bit more than $2 million, in an effort to compensate him for unvested JPMorgan shares.

Staley had previously been at JPMorgan and ran its asset management operations before moving to the investment bank in 2009 and then switching to BlueMountain Capital Management, a hedge fund.

[bctt tweet=”Jes Staley officially is named the Barclays CEO.”]

As WSJ said, Staley comes to Barclays in the wake of the dismissal of Antony Jenkins, who left this past summer on the orders of the board of directors. Moving to a more streamlined (yet lucrative) investment banking profile has proved to be a reach that has exceeded many a Barclays executive’s grasp.

In terms of running the investment bank itself, Staley must satisfy the mandate that the unit harbor a maximum of 30 percent of the company’s total risk-weighted assets, a ratio that now stands at about 50 percent. In one move that may prove a harbinger of strategy to come, a Barclays private equity business, focused on energy and commodities, said it had agreed to a management buyout.

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