The wealth and investment division of Barclays has boosted its team in East Anglia with a new senior hire for its Ipswich office.

Andrew Spivey has joined as a portfolio manager to run discretionary portfolios in the East Anglia portfolio management team (this team is part of the firm’s global research and investments department). Spivey was latterly a private client manager at Killik & Co in Ipswich.

East Anglia is one of the UK regions which Barclays has made an expansion focus and in the last year the firm has opened three new offices in addition to the Ipswich base - in Norwich, Cambridge and Peterborough. Barclays’ wealth and investment management team in East Anglia is headed by regional director Simon Smith and is now 24-strong.

In another related appointment, earlier this month the firm boosted the corporate wealth advisory team within its corporate and employer solutions unit with the addition of James Wood as a corporate wealth advisor in Ipswich. Wood was latterly a commercial financial planning advisor at HSBC.

Barclays has been busily building out its corporate wealth advisory unit, after having launched it earlier this year, and has made four appointments to it in recent months. The firm is also clearly keen to tap entrepreneurs and SMEs throughout the other UK regions. Anthony Whittington, one of the four corporate advisors to join the unit earlier this year, is now based in Crawley, West Sussex, for example.

Corporate advisory services are now increasingly seen as a core part of wealth managers’ offerings due to the rising numbers of entrepreneurs in the high net worth segment and the fact that operational businesses now form a much more significant part of clients’ wealth.