iShares

On Monday UK largest bank Barclays reported that it is in talks with BlackRock over a potential sale of its Barclays Global Investors business, but added that "significant" issues must be addressed for a deal to go ahead. The bank said that it has received proposals for the BGI business and for just the iShares exchange-traded-funds unit.

Barclays Plc is negotiating the sale of its asset management arm, Barclays Global Investors (BGI), for about $10 billion to potential bidders including U.S. money manager BlackRock, reported the Financial Times.

According to the unnamed sources cited by the paper buying BGI would give BlackRock a big boost in exchange-traded funds, which are a specialty of BGI's iShares unit.

Barclays has revealed it was in exclusive talks to sell its iShares asset management unit to private equity firm CVC Partners. The deal is likely to be worth around 3 billion pounds ($4.3 billion). Some of the other potential bidders were Goldman Sachs Bain Capital and a consortium of Hellman & Friedman and Apax Partners.

According to the Monday edition of the Daily Telegraph British bank Barclays is pressed to consider the sale of its entire $1 trillion fund management business, Barclays Global Investors. While two newspapers reported on Sunday that Barclays is nosing about the potential buyers for its iShares business.