Financial services firm Barclays Capital Australia has denied rumours it will abandon targeting the financial planning market as a result of a recent internal restructure.
The group was believed to have scrapped its financial intermediary and wholesale-oriented investor solutions business as the revamp saw the departure of head of investor solutions Tim Bradbury, who joined a year ago after having been the co-head of exchange-traded fund (ETF) manufacturer iShares Australia.
However, the company confirmed that instead the unit had been combined with the institutional macro and alternatives business.
Barclays Capital head of distribution Allen McCristal will now lead the combined division as head of institutional sales and investor solutions.
“We have made some very slight changes to the way that we go about our business and unfortunately that’s impacted on a member of staff,” McCristal said.
“Historically the institutional business and investor solutions business used to be apart, but now we are joining them together so we can give better support to the retail and third-party market and also formulate more of a strategic attack to design strategies for the institutional market.”
He said Bradbury’s responsibilities would be absorbed by other Barclays Capital staff, including head of fund solutions Caroline Saunders and business development managers Amanda Conner and Alex Zayka, who was recently hired from Macquarie Group.
“While Tim has departed we have also added resources to our team and we are also working on rolling out a number of new funds this year,” he said.
“The way that we’re looking at it is we’ve got two strategies; one which is where we have our own funds and we are marketing that to planners and they will be on wrap platforms and we will work with advisers attached to those wrap platforms.
“The other side of the business is similar – we are designing products, but we are using third-party distribution channels and we are only going to the large institutions, such as the banks, and a number of selected larger distributors, such as Instreet, who have their own deferred purchase agreement or distribution platform.”
He said Barclays Capital was also looking to add capital protection to products and platforms.
The company planned to launch a multi-asset class macro product and a new fund under its Dynamic brand, which invests in multiple ETFs and uses capital protection.
“We’re currently doing market testing and are looking to roll those out in coming months. The new Dynamic fund may invest in local equity ETFs,” McCristal said.
“We have also launched with Instreet a number of Combats, which is our closed-ended commodity strategy. We closed one at the end of December and there are two in the market now and we are hoping to launch another one in March.”
The firm was gauging whether there was market interest to develop a product based on its new Barclays Capital Commodities Research Index, he said.
