 "Bloomberg to buy Barclays index business for $787 mn")
Barclays said on Wednesday that it had agreed to sell its risk analytics and index solutions business to Bloomberg L.P. for 520 million pounds, or about $787 million.
The deal includes a variety of financial market indexes, including a family of bond indexes, and tools for analyzing and constructing financial portfolios.
The deal is the latest by Barclays as it seeks to reshape itself by selling underperforming businesses and focusing on what it considers its core operations. The London-based bank announced the sale this month of another noncore business, its retail banking business in Italy, to CheBanca, a unit of Mediobanca Group of Italy.
The overhaul began under Antony P. Jenkins, the lender’s former chief executive who was ousted in July, and is continuing under its new top executive, James E. Staley, who officially joined Barclays this month.
“We are pleased to partner closely with Bloomberg upon completion of the transaction, including maintaining a co-branding arrangement on the benchmark indices for an initial term of five years,” Mr. Staley said in a news release.
Barclays said it would retain its quantitative investment strategy index business, but would outsource calculation and maintenance of those indexes to Bloomberg.
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The bank expects to reap a pretax gain of about £480 million related to the transaction on completion. The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in mid-2016.
As part of its overhaul, Barclays is focused on four core businesses: its corporate and retail bank in Britain, its investment bank, its Barclaycard credit card operations and its African banking businesses.
“As financial markets continue to evolve, our clients need and expect the index business to evolve, too,” Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg L.P., said in a news release.
“Combining the market-leading Barclays indices and their superb team with our data management, analytics and distribution will provide more independence, liquidity and transparency to the marketplace, improve industry innovation and further meet the diverse needs of our global client base,” he added.