BARCLAYS Capital’s claims to be one of the major players in the world of equity capital markets will only have been enhanced by its inclusion as one of the book-runners in Facebook’s $5bn flotation.
It is the only UK-based bank on the list and that alone can act to reinforce the view that it picked up a gold-mine when it bought the US business of the collapsed Lehman bank in 2008.
The Facebook mandate follows hard on the heels of the bank’s involvement in the Groupon flotation, where it was a book-runner, and the flotation of Freescale.
And BarCap came second overall last year as an adviser for US technology IPOs.
But it’s not just been floats that BarCap is getting itself involved in. On the mergers front, BarCap was the lead adviser to Hewlett Packard last year when it bid $10.3bn for Mike Lynch’s Autonomy Group.
In London, BarCap has been going out all guns blazing to win corporate brokerships, with a view to winning more company related financing deals.
Recent wins include IAG, the parent of British Airways and Iberia, Clive Cowdery’s Resolution Group and 3i. Yesterday it won joint brokership of FTSE 100 company Tullow Oil.
