Barclays' Anticipated New CEO Jes Staley: A Look Back at his Career

If at first you don’t succeed…

Former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. executive James "Jes" Staley is set to be named CEO at Barclays PLC, The WSJ is reporting. The appointment, which is still subject to regulatory approval, could be made in the coming weeks.

For Mr. Staley, it would serve as the culmination of what's been an understated but long and successful career in banking.

When he was named investment-banking head at J.P. Morgan in 2009, many viewed him as Jamie Dimon’s successor. Yet the chatter about him replacing Mr. Dimon was always based on the idea that Mr. Staley, while running the large investment bank, would be the choice to step in if Mr. Dimon left suddenly. Mr. Dimon and the board trusted Mr. Staley to do the job.

But the plan always got stickier if Mr. Dimon's exit wasn't sudden. Mr. Dimon and Mr. Staley are close in age and given that J.P. Morgan cares about promoting younger executives, it seemed unlikely the board would name Mr. Staley CEO if Mr. Dimon's tenure continued for years or even a decade.

Mr. Staley told Fortune magazine in 2010 that he wouldn’t hang around forever if he wasn’t J.P. Morgan’s CEO. So it is of little surprise that in 2012, when Barclays was in search of a new CEO that Mr. Staley was in the running. Barclays chose Antony Jenkins, who it pushed out this summer.

Now it looks like Mr. Staley is close to leading one of the world's largest financial institutions. Here’s a quick look at his career:

Mr. Staley graduated from Bowdoin College in 1979 and soon joined Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. For most of the 1980s, he worked in Brazil for the financial institution. By the end of the decade, he had ascended to the head of corporate finance there and was general manager of Morgan's brokerage division.

He returned to New York and ran J.P. Morgan's convertible securities trading desk before being tapped to run its private bank in 1999. In the following decade when he ran the private bank, it grew to $1.3 trillion in assets under management from roughly $600 billion. He also chalked up two of his biggest successes.

The WSJ has said that his "breakthrough career moment" was when he won over CEO Jamie Dimon to the idea of offering only internal investment products to the wealthy clients of its private bank, known as a closed architecture strategy.

In 2004, he persuaded his boss, Mr. Dimon, to purchase a large interest in Highbridge Capital Mangement, a successful hedge fund.

Mr. Staley took over as investment-bank chief executive in September 2009, after Mr. Dimon unexpectedly pushed out longtime investment-bank co-chiefs Steve Black and Bill Winters in a reorganization. On Mr. Staley's watch the unit performed solidly, producing net income over $6.6 billion for each of 2009, 2010 and 2011.

In July 2012, he gave up day-to-day oversight of J.P. Morgan's investment bank in a reorganization and became chairman of the newly formed corporate and investment-banking unit.

Mr. Staley left J.P. Morgan in 2013, after a 34-year career there, to join BlueMountain Capital Management, a firm run by former J.P. Morgan executives that traded against the London Whale and profited, but then helped the bank unwind its positions.

Since joining BlueMountain, he's been one of a litany of voices warning about how a dwindling pool of certain credit derivatives could pose new risks to the financial system.