The announcement yesterday that Peter Horrell, chief executive of the wealth and investment part of Barclays, is to leave at the end of this year – with a hunt now on for a replacement – is bound to set tongues wagging about the future of this business.

The announcement yesterday that Peter Horrell, chief executive of the wealth and investment part of Barclays, is to leave at the end of this year – with a hunt now on for a replacement – is bound to set tongues wagging about the future of this business.

Well, for a start, a man with a 23-year-plus career at Barclays (admirable longevity in these revolving-door times) is surely entitled to think about doing something different. Also, as I understand it, the decision announced in May this year by the UK-listed bank to restructure its units, reducing them to just four, played a part in making Horrell think it was time to go. The last few years have seen Barclays Wealth – a fairly snappy title – change to Barclays Wealth & Investment Management, and now it will be folded into the Personal and Corporate Banking division. Its stand-alone status is over, as we journalists will find out when the next batch of results hit the stock market.

"I am not sure what sort of wealth management business Barclays is now committed to,” Christopher Wheeler, analyst at Mediobanca, told me yesterday. “It does not feel like it is the business that was talked-up by Bob Diamond three years ago," he continued. (He was referring to former group CEO who resigned in late 2012 amid the LIBOR-rigging scandal.)

Besides its European wealth and investment business, Barclays also operates in regions such as Africa - where its roots are deep and broad - the Middle East and Asia. (In Asia, Barclays made a number of high-level hires last year, for example.)

Wheeler wondered about the fate of the US-based wealth management arm under any new leadership.  Barclays' wealth business in the US, which had been designed a few years ago with the intent of working closely with the investment banking unit that was bolstered by the Lehman Bros acquisition, could be possibly sold if the bank decides it is too costly to restructure it further, Wheeler said. "I would not be surprised if Barclays sold the US unit."

But for all that this restructuring and change might look like a bit of a regression, actual results for the bank’s bottom line have been decent, if not spectacular. And why would the bank want to give up on that? A few weeks ago, Barclays said its wealth and investment arm logged a 22 per cent rise in pre-tax profit when costs of its Transform program are taken out. Perhaps just as significantly, when Transform costs are excluded, the closely-watched cost-income ratio narrowed to 80 per cent in the first three months of this year, compared with 85 per cent a year ago. In recent years, the average cost/income ratio of wealth management firms worldwide has hovered in the region of 80 per cent or slightly lower. Perhaps slightly less encouragingly, total client assets at the end of March stood at £198.3 billion, down £3 billion from the end of last year, although recent market conditions have been mixed. It is a varied bag, but by no means a poor one.

And market performance is worth bearing in mind: when the resignation announcement came out, Barclays’ share price was up over 2.0 per cent from the previous close. From what I can gather the Horrell announcement hadn’t been trailed in the media or other forums, so markets appear relaxed. On the day the restructuring announcement was made a few weeks ago, shares also spiked. There is a perception that investors like the boldness of CEO Antony Jenkins’ approach.

Horrell hasn’t been in his current role all that long; he held the CEO role in a full-time capacity since last September, having been made interim chief executive of the unit last May. What is undeniable is that the bank as a whole has been through a series of turbulent changes, such as the Diamond resignation post-LIBOR. Horrell’s predecessor had been Tom Kalaris">Tom Kalaris, who had been at the firm since 1996. Much of the old shape of the wealth business was down to Kalaris and his team; when the latter left the firm it was perhaps inevitable that the structure of this business would start to look and feel very different. Whoever took it on would expect a lot of change.

When asked about the relative prominence of wealth within the Barclays’ empire going forward, the bank stated that its strategy “remains unchanged,” pointing to its results. However, it does have to be asked whether the distinctiveness of the brand has been watered down by the new structure, and what type of client will be served and wooed by it. An issue for the bank will be whether the kind of person possibly wondering about the pros and cons of a pure-play operation or integrated one will be interested in going to Barclays.

There may also be more of a blurring of the lines between the high net worth and mass affluent lines. Remember that Barclays’ wealth arm has already hiked its client investor minimums to £500,000 ($851,931); it created a new unit to deal with people falling under that level. It is sometimes said – such as by Royal Bank of Scotland’s wealth arm – that there is a sort of “sweet spot” in wealth management that is somewhere between the bottom end of the HNW spectrum and the ultra high net worth end. But maybe Barclays has come to the conclusion that it is not quite so simple as that.

In any event, Peter Horrell, who drew glowing praise from his colleagues yesterday, leaves a wealth management business in decent financial shape. What remains to be seen is the extent to which the wealth business continues to be a significant part of its parent’s plans, both in the UK, and abroad.