The British banking giant said the shake-up, while putting jobs at risk, will help collaboration between the experts that support its investment processes.

Barclays is planning a reorganisation of its UK discretionary portfolio management team, a move that will see “small” job losses, the bank confirmed to this publication.

The proposal involves a shift for portfolio managers from generalist activity to specialisation in the following three areas: 

• Implementation: This team will be based in Glasgow, responsible for managing portfolios to Barclays’ best-thinking models
• Portfolio management: This team, based in London, will be responsible for constructing best-thinking models in collaboration with investment specialists, while managing portfolios with bespoke requirements
• Discretionary product specialists: Based in London and other major UK cities, they will support relationship management teams

Barclays currently employs less than 50 people in its discretionary portfolio management team. The bank said the restructure is expected to result in “small” job losses and that new roles will become available for the “vast majority” of the team in the three new areas.

The new set-up seeks to bring more closely together asset class selection, manager selection, asset allocation, portfolio construction and risk management specialists so as to provide a consistent approach to delivering risk-adjusted returns to portfolio managers.

“As part of Barclays' ongoing commitment to grow and transform the business for the benefit of its clients, we are focusing the investment team to better support the way we construct and manage clients’ portfolios, and ensure our market leading proposition continues to be aligned to client needs,” said a Barclays spokesperson.

“Specialisation and collaboration is at the heart of this and is how we believe that we will deliver our best investment thinking consistently to all of our clients, through our relationship teams.”