Barclays has continued to trim away its non-core business by driving through the sale of its risk analytics and index unit to Bloomberg for around £615 million.
The banking giant said it would make a pre-tax gain of about £535 million once the sale of Barclays Risk Analytics and Index Solutions (BRAIS) was complete.
The move is part of the lender's strategy of focusing on its core UK and US banking operations by closing its non-core businesses.
The overhaul has seen the lender sell its Barclaycard credit card operations in Spain and Portugal to Bancopopular-e and sell down its 62.3% stake in Barclays Africa.
Jes Staley, chief executive of Barclays, said the deal with Bloomberg would bring the bank closer to achieving its strategy of running down non-core.
"As I said at our interim results, the second half of this year will include even more progress in non-core rundown as we anticipate closing the sale of our cards business in Iberia, the sale of our wealth business in Asia, and the sale of our Italian retail network." he said.
"These transactions, including BRAIS today, will bring down annualised costs in non-core by £250 million and reduce RWAs by a further £3 billion."
The unit sold to Bloomberg includes Barclays' fixed income benchmark indices, its aggregate family of indices and BRAIS strategy of indices.
The bank said the benchmark indices would be rebranded to Bloomberg Barclays Indices for an initial period of five years.
It added that it will hold on to its quantitative investment strategy index business and the Barclays strategy indices, but the calculation and maintenance of its strategy indices will be outsourced to Bloomberg.
The deal also includes intellectual property linked to the POINT portfolio analytics tool, with Barclays continuing to operate POINT for a year and a half after the sale.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here