Barclays CIB chief Throsby gets £12.5m of shares

By Steve Slater and Sinead Cruise

LONDON, March 16 (IFR) - Barclays (LSE: BARC.L - news) ' investment bank boss Tim Throsby has been awarded shares worth £12.5m, including £9m to compensate him for stock he forfeited when he joined the British bank last year from JP Morgan.

Throsby joined Barclays in January 2017 to be chief executive of Barclays International, which includes the corporate and investment bank (CIB). He had been at JP Morgan since 2010 and Barclays last week awarded him shares with a gross value of £9m to cover the buy-out of stock he forfeited when he left the US bank.

Barclays said Throsby was also granted shares worth £3m as part of his variable pay for 2017, most of which is deferred, and £487,500 of shares in so-called 'role-based pay' for the first three months of 2018. Full details of Throsby's pay, including his salary and cash bonus, are not disclosed as he is not on the board.

Throsby is one of several former JP Morgan bankers Barclays (Swiss: BARC.SW - news) has hired, including chief executive Jes Staley.

Chief (Taiwan OTC: 3345.TWO - news) operating officer Paul Compton was also lured from JP Morgan (Other OTC: MGHL - news) , and Barclays said Compton was awarded shares worth £7.3m, including £4.8m for forfeited stock.

RETURNS PRESSURE

There is growing pressure on Staley and Throsby to improve returns at the investment bank, and several investors said they want to see clear progress by the end of this year. After trading revenues fell in 2017, Barclays said the first two months of this year had been better.

"Assuming market conditions remain favourable, then we would really be looking to see high single-digit returns on equity for this business by the next year-end, or questions will need to be answered," Steve Davies, manager of the Jupiter UK Growth Fund, and a top 40 Barclays investor, told Reuters.

CIB had a return on average allocated tangible equity of just 1.1% last year, down from a modest 6.1% in 2016. It is the main drag on Staley's target of getting group return on tangible equity above 9% in 2019 and over 10% in 2020.

Another investor, who declined to be named, said he was worried about how regulation could undermine efforts by Barclays to win market share.

"Regulatory reform in the US could make life even tougher as US peers are able to deploy more balance sheet into the IB business as leverage restrictions are eased somewhat," the investor said.

Throsby plans to redeploy capital from the corporate loans book to higher-returning opportunities in the investment bank, is encouraging staff to take more risk, and plans to ramp up investment in its technology and trading platforms to improve profitability. (This story will appear in the March 17 issue of IFR Magazine)