Last week, Barclays announced the appointment of Duncan Beattie and Duncan Connellan (pictured) in Sydney as managing directors of the bank’s Australian Investment Banking division. They commenced their new roles on 10 and 17 January, respectively, a spokesperson confirmed with FinanceAsia.
Both report to Richard Satchwell, country CEO and head of Investment Banking for Australia and the pair will be responsible for further expanding the Barclays franchise in the country, according to the bank’s public announcement.
The bank’s spokesperson elaborated on this strategy, sharing with FA, “Barclays sees Australia as an attractive and important financial services market and is committed to build-out in Australia to support our clients. We believe it is important to secure an authorised deposit-taking institution (ADI) licence for Barclays’ business, in order to re-establish a permanent onshore presence in the form of a Bank branch. This is an important demonstration of our commitment to Australian clients and Australian regulators.”
The bank secured its ADI licence in December 2021 and it currently operates as a predominately corporate and investment bank across six markets in Asia Pacific; Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.
“The ADI licence will enable us to fully leverage the full-suite of the global Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) platform to support the financing and risk management needs of Australian clients and is complementary to our cross-border advisory business,” the spokesperson said.
In September 2020, Barclays became a foundation investor in Australia-based financial services firm, Barrenjoey, to extend its client reach. It agreed to invest A$45 million ($32.59 million) in the company for a 9.99% economic interest and a 4.99% voting interest.
The bank’s spokesperson commented that the new appointments complement the bank’s Barrenjoey partnership, “We are seeing results of the investment with a strong pipeline of transactions one year on.”
In terms of trends that the investment banking team is seeing across Australasia and into the year ahead, the spokesperson told FA, “Public M&A in Australia had a record year in 2021, fueled by supply of pension and super fund money, low interest rates, companies seeking growth opportunities in new technology businesses, ESG focus and shareholder activism. This activity shows no signs of slowing at this stage.. and is consistent with what we are seeing elsewhere in global markets.”
She added that the uptick in M&A activity has led to an increase in demand for acquisition financing which plays to Barclays’ strength locally.
“Another trend we are seeing is clients looking to actively pull forwards refinancing activities. Whilst we don’t necessarily see near-term catalysts for market widening we are seeing clients look actively to take advantage of the current market conditions given a focus on the potential for rising rates at some stage.”
Beattie joins Barclays with 30 years of capital markets experience. He most recently led JP Morgan’s Financia Institutions Group (FIG) and served at the bank as co-head of Debt Capital Markets for 16 years. He spent a decade in London working for Nomura covering equity capital markets and also previously held a position at KPMG in Glasgow.
Connellan brings to the role two decades of investment and commercial expertise across investment and commercial banking. He rejoins the bank from MUFG where he lead the bank’s Strategic and Acquisition Finance team in Australia and New Zealand. He had previously led Barclay’s Loan Capital Markets and Leveraged Finance division. He also served at the Royal Bank of Scotland and National Australia Bank.
