Barclays Global to remain in Toronto, cut staff

Date: Monday, January 19, 2009
Author: Advisor.ca

Barclays Global Investors is not closing its trading and asset-management operations in Canada, as previously reported in other media.

However, BGI will be relocating some elements of its Toronto shop to its San Francisco headquarters over the next several months.

"We are transitioning some of our trading operations to a North American platform and moving the operations down to the U.S.," says a BGI representative who preferred to remain anonymous. "Aside from that, it's business as usual for us. Everyone from sales, service and research in our Toronto and Montreal offices are remaining the same."

After a strategic review, the decision was taken to consolidate the Toronto operations team with the San Francisco office to "encourage growth and momentum."

While the departure of BGI Canada’s chief executive officer Rajiv Silgardo was not confirmed, Bill Chinery, the current head of BGI Canada’s institutional business, will lead the company going forward.

The number of staff cuts could not be confirmed and details on other aspects of the company, such as what effect this will have on BGI's North American transition management business, were not available at the time of publication.

The cuts are also not expected to have any meaningful impact on Barclay's lucrative exchange-trade-fund business, iShares. iShares is the largest ETF provider in Canada. The process of rebalancing ETFs to correspond to their indexes will remain the same.

Much of iShares back office business will be moved to San Francisco, which is actually isn't very much different from other leading ETF firms in the country. The most important aspect for running Canadian indexes — which are popular with Canadian investors — is to have domiciled designated brokers available. None of iShares designated brokers or marketing and sales teams are expected to be moving.