Structured products house of the year: Barclays

Risk Asia Awards 2025

Barclays has been investing in its structured products business aggressively over the past six years, clawing back market share from competitors thanks to its strong structuring team, creative ideas and solid technology platform.

“Given the highly competitive nature of Asia-Pacific’s structured products market, ensuring we are relevant both on pricing and solutions in line with market context are key areas of focus,” says Christian Treuer, head of equities distribution for Apac.

Christian Treuer, Barclays

Last year, the British investment bank re-entered Taiwan, a market it pulled out of in 2016. Barclays has also been launching new client engagement initiatives, expanding its portfolio of private banking clients and strengthening its retail footprint.

Client engagement initiatives

This year, Barclays saw a lot of clients switching between risk-on and risk-off strategies as they tried to keep up with wild swings in the market environment. In response, the structured products team has worked hard to come up with innovative ideas for these mutable needs.

“We have had to adjust our product offering to help clients cope with the shifting environment,” says Selim Piot, head of equity derivatives private bank distribution, Asia ex-Japan. “For the past three years, interest from Apac investors was primarily on US names, but now we’re seeing renewed interest in local markets such as Hong Kong stocks. Adaptation and diversification are key.”

Earlier this year, Barclays launched a new email newsletter for private banking and wealth management distributors, designed to deliver timely product ideas aligned with current market trends. The bank has also launched a new initiative to proactively engage with distributors by identifying any potential restructuring opportunities.

Selim Piot, Barclays

Piot says the idea of both these initiatives is “to show, on a regular basis, thematic ideas on the back of what is happening in the macroeconomic context”.

For instance, at the start of the year, Barclays structuring team correctly predicted a rally in the Chinese stock market. This was in the wake of the launch DeepSeek, China’s artificial intelligence chatbot, and amid signs that government policy was becoming friendlier to private business.

“In anticipation of this we presented clients with several investment structures linked to Chinese ETFs, Hong Kong-listed shares and Chinese indices, aiming to increase their upside participation in Chinese equity,” says Thomas Bord, head of equity derivatives exotics structuring for Apac. “This had been disregarded by investors in 2023 and the first half of 2024, and clients were happy for us to proactively bring these structures back. Short-term, bullish structures were particularly attractive on the back on the elevated repo levels.”

Client testimony backs this claim up.

“Barclays has been very supportive and proactive in showing us new ideas,” says a client at a regional private bank in Singapore. “The bank is very creative in the kinds of solutions they provide and extremely flexible pricing.”

This client says his private bank has been distributing many more tailored products, with Barclays able to quickly provide resources for structuring these solutions as they are required.

“Barclays has shown that they can accommodate different solutions for the same trade, whereas other banks may not be able to put together alternative ideas so quickly,” says the client.

Thomas Bord, Barclays

Another client who works for a private bank in Hong Kong, adds: “Unlike other banks we use, we have a lot of face-to-face time with Barclays, so they have a good understanding of what our needs are. They also have very good product capabilities.”

This client-centric approach has led to a number of key innovations at Barclays, including the launch last year of a new investment quantitative technology platform Dynamic Volcast.

“Unlike traditional volatility control mechanisms that rebalance daily based on closing price volatility, Dynamic Volcast allows us to observe the volatility for a particular look-back window and adjust that exposure intraday as necessary,” says Shuichi Akito, head of equity derivatives solutions structuring for Apac. “The timing of this innovation was ideal, allowing us to offer Apac clients more effective option pricing – supporting both downside protection and upside participation to equities.”

Taiwan

For further evidence of Barclays’ commitment to Apac’s structured products market, look to Taiwan.

This was a market the UK bank completely exited in 2016, focusing its attention on activities outside Asia instead.

Shuichi Akito, Barclays

Nearly a decade later and Barclays is once again within the top 10 structured products issuers in the country. But the team doesn’t want to stop there. They want to be within the top three.

Piot admits that the Taiwanese team is “currently under the microscope”, as clients want to make sure that the bank is committed to the market and is not about to exit again.

“Our experience of re-entering the Taiwanese market has been very positive, and it is important for us to keep up this momentum,” says Piot. “It was a big vote of confidence to see our clients be as supportive as they have been. This has allowed us to be onboarded by distributors very quickly.”

Barclays sees the Taiwan market as a natural extension of its business in Singapore and Hong Kong, with clients demanding similar products, both in terms of the underlyings and the pay-off structures.

“This has proven to be the right move for us and says a lot about our approach to Apac’s structured products markets,” Treuer says. “Our team is very focused on growth in Asia, but we want to make sure we are growing in a long-term and sustainable way.”