BARCLAYS BANK

Business Strategy of Barclays Bank

Business Strategy of Barclays Bank

Introduction

Barclays Bank has advanced its plans to become a top five global bank with a strategic refresh of its Internet business, taking the best that emerging technology has to offer to deliver improvement to cross-channel collaboration, customer satisfaction, and sales volumes (Andrews, 2006). The bank has optimised decision making and mitigated risk for IT investment with a new, comprehensive ROI model and a better informed commercial view of the market.

Barclays in the mid 1960's, realised the importance of change in order to achieve its goal of being the market leader in banking and other financial services. Barclaycard is the top credit card processor and consumer lending services in the United Kingdom. Barclays is not an independent company but just a department of Barclays Bank (Michael, 2006). It has its main office located in Northampton. Barclays Bank has truly comes as no revelation as the bank is headed by an extremely inventive leader, Marcus Agius, Chairman of Barclays who says all the pioneering notes seize roots at the same time as he is on a trade journey (Elewaut, 2007).

Barclays Business Strategy

Technological and other innovations have significantly affected virtually every customer segment served by UK banks, from personal, commercial, and corporate customers to institutional and international accounts. Faced with an increasing number of competitors in the industry since the early 1980s, banks have had to make their operations more cost-efficient, introduce new and innovative products and improve customer service (Einhorn, 2007).

To remain competitive in the UK banking industry, banks will have to provide fast, efficient, and error-free service. Their customers will have zero tolerance for institutions that do not provide this standard of service. As a result, banks will no longer be able to distinguish themselves from their competitors by their superior ability to deliver products and services. Instead, this will become a prerequisite for remaining in the business (Bernard, 2008).

As a first step toward cost reduction and improved efficiency, Honk Kong's banks automated cheque processing and internal accounting activities. Today, the process continues with additional back-room automation in areas such as the processing of letters of credit, Visa and MasterCard transactions, image processing for cheques, and the automation of smaller commercial loans. More noticeable to the customer is the trend toward more self-service banking through the use of personal and commercial automated teller machines, PC-based cash management products, and point-of-sale terminals. While automation will continue, future initiatives will involve other types of changes (Andrews, 2006).

In fact, UK banks (such as Barclays Bank) have already begun to focus more on non-credit, fee-generating products. These higher-margin products require little or no bank capital, and banks will develop them at a rapidly accelerating rate over the next few years as their tolerance for credit losses diminishes further and as interest rates remain low. Advisory services such as corporate finance, merger and acquisition services, equity underwriting, portfolio management, cash management, and the distribution or brokering of non-bank financial products will all take on ...