Barclays designates ex-Morgan Stanley banker as head of investment banking

As it became known on Monday, Barclays hired Matthew Ginsburg, a former top Asia banker at Morgan Stanley, in a move to strengthen its efforts to quickly become a full service investment bank that aims to compete with top Wall Street and European rivals. The move comes after Barclays has earned some major deal mandates lately, including an advisory role on the Las Vegas Sands IPO.

Barclays named the ex-Morgan Stanley veteran as head of investment banking, Asia Pacific, and his responsibilities will include Japan. Besides, Ginsburg will be a member of the Barclays Capital Asia Pacific Executive Committee and will also be on the investment banking division's executive committee. Ginsburg, who held the same title at Morgan Stanley, will be based in Hong Kong and will report regionally to Barclays APAC CEO Robert Morrice and globally to Hugh (Skip) McGee, head of investment banking.

Barclays, which previously was focused mainly on debt-related products such as loans, bonds and other fixed income instruments, sees a chance to expand into stock underwriting and other equity related products, in addition to M&A advisory. Last year, Barclay's equity expansion was helped by the purchase of Lehman Brothers U.S. investment banking business. In an embargoed interview with Reuters on Thursday, APAC CEO Morrice talked about Ginsburg's immediate goals and provided an update on the equities build out.

"The first thing is to develop a strategy to extend the investment banking business we already have," he said. "We need a strategy to build out our industrial sector coverage, and how we're going to expand our income tree as he comes in and looks at a different geographic spread."

Barclays does not have an equity capital markets group in place yet, so it is mainly missing out on the major wave of IPOs coming through the Hong Kong and Chinese stock markets. According to Morrice, Barclays plans to have its global equities platform in place by the first quarter of 2010.