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Transcription of Robert E. Diamond Jr.'s Closing Remarks at the Risk Management and Barclays Capital Seminar, in PDF format. To view PDF files you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available from http://www.adobe.com/acrobat. Adobe, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Closing Remarks Before we turn it over to Matt for questions and answers, just a couple of thoughts I would like to share with you. I spent 13 years with Morgan Stanley and four years with Credit Suisse before I joined Barclays. So I really know the pitch of why the Americans dominated this business and what is different? Why are we able to do this? What is fundamentally driving it? There are two things I would like you to keep in mind. One is very obvious and that is the introduction of a single currency in a single market. Prior to the introduction of the euro, it would have been very, very hard, in the space of Europe, with the multi domestic markets of create the kind of business model we have and the business flows that we have. That has all been thrown aside with the single currency of the depth, the liquidity of the capital markets in Europe, really now stand very strongly against those in the US. The second thing that afflicted it, are the European participants for a long time in competing with the Americans, is that they really struggled to allow a performance based culture to emerge within a universal bank. You heard Matt talk about the importance of allowing this in Barclays Capital. Barclays, under Matt's leadership, is quite comfortable in having an investment bank and other businesses that are based more in intellectual capital than economic capital to allow the performance based culture to exist and to live alongside the many other cultures that you will find in an organisation as large as Barclays. So those two things have changed dramatically. If you look at the business, what I would tell you is, we like our model. We see a number of, not all of them, but I think all of you can think of at least two or three European competitors who are still struggling with an all product, multi domestic or single domestic, stand alone investment banking model and were they really struggling, they were struggling with their profitability line. On the other hand we are not slavishly following the model of the bulge bracket Americans, it is a new world with the euro. We like the fact that we are Bank. We can take advantage of the loan business and the bond business and bring them together and integrate them. We like the fact that we are Europeans. We also like the fact that we are focused. Most importantly Matt has committed to the doubling of economic profit every four years and what the team at Barclays Capital believes is with continued close management of our risk, we can do more than our fair share to help double economic profit in the Group. Going forward what you can look for from us is a continued shift of investment. As we have completed the build out of the infrastructure in the back office and the products. We will continue as we have been in the year 2000 investing in the origination and distribution, so we can continue to grow our business. Lastly I would like to thank you very much for giving us the time today to tell this story.
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