Who we are
Barclays delivers personalized banking, wealth advisory and investment solutions from affluent to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals and institutions, providing full access to complex and innovative products and services across Barclays’ platforms.
Barclays manages a diverse range of clients that stretches beyond high net worth individuals, including family offices, charities, foundations and endowments, captives, sovereign wealth funds, insurance and institutional companies, etc.
The long-standing Discretionary Portfolio Management service sits at the core of the Bank's investment offering.
The team offers a range of portfolios to meet a wide range of client needs and goals, from our flagship Multi-Asset Class and our Sustainable portfolios, to our more specialist Equity and Fixed Income strategies. The team services clients globally from five booking centres in London, Dublin, Jersey, Geneva and Monaco.
What we do
Our approach to investment has been developed and refined by the team over a number of years and is reflected in the discretionary investment portfolios we manage for our clients. We offer modelled portfolios across Multi-Asset Class, Fixed Income and Equity specialist teams and also have the capability of managing tailored portfolios for larger investment sizes, dependent on the client’s investment requirements.
We also provide clients with the ability to apply an ethical filter to their portfolio to remove a defined set of industries such as alcohol and tobacco. Barclays also offers a Sustainable strategy which leverages our flagship multi-asset offering by applying an additional three stage Sustainability assessment.
The Discretionary Team
Portfolios are run by a stable and experienced team, with our senior portfolio managers averaging more than 11 years at Barclays. This stability is a reflection of our investment culture whereby portfolio managers are encouraged to think independently, whilst working together as a team to develop and apply their collective best thinking. This is also important for the consistency of the investment process and decision-making of the team over the long term.
Our Investment Philosophy
- We invest in high quality assets which we typically hold for a very long period of time.
- We believe in taking a 'total return' approach rather than investing for income, whereby we seek to maximise returns of the portfolio by identifying companies which will grow and compound over time.
- The multi-asset class strategy is diversified globally across asset classes, currencies and sectors. Geographical allocations are the product of thorough bottom-up analysis meaning we do not employ a home bias to ensure as broad an opportunity set as possible.
- We follow an active, high conviction approach.
- We seek to deemphasise market timing. Instead, we focus on identifying high quality assets that we want to own for the long term, resulting in low turnover. In doing so, we run our winners by allowing companies to grow in the portfolio, maximising the compounding effect of successful investments.
- The team has a preference to invest directly into stocks and bonds in order to maintain control and accountability over portfolio exposures and risks. By having a firm grasp on the risks inherent in investing, as well as potential returns, the team seeks to deliver strong and calculated risk adjusted returns over the long term.
- The team seeks to minimise use, and therefore associated higher costs, of third-party funds. Where the team does use funds, we adopt an open architecture approach, meaning that we are free to invest in the best funds available across the investment industry.
Our Flagship Multi-Asset Class Strategy
Barclays Private Bank provides MPI performance reporting on our flagship Multi-Asset Class portfolios, across GBP, USD and EUR currencies and five risk profiles.
In building our Multi-Asset Class portfolios, we use a weighted blend of nine asset classes, designed to deliver competitive risk-adjusted returns though varying market conditions.
From an asset allocation perspective, we doubt the ability of most, if not all market participants to make regular tactical adjustments to portfolio asset allocation which can add value. We therefore deemphasise this element of the investment process in the belief that quality company business models can generate genuine long term capital appreciation and drive returns for our clients. We tend to only make tactical asset allocation moves at more significant points in the economic cycle.
Please contact us with any questions on these strategies, or on our specialist equity and fixed income capabilities.
