Eagles, Eggs and a Flight from the Nest
It’s difficult to know what to make of market speculation, but the story doing the rounds at the end of last week was that Barclays is a takeover target of the Bank of America.
If this is true then it seems very strange that the Barclays Chairman, Matt Barrett, sold £6.5 million worth of shares last week. People also speculate that the two organisations would be a good fit. Bank of America recently bought MBNA the credit card company and whilst there would be obvious synergies, I’m unsure if Barclaycard wants or needs a merger with another credit card outfit.
Another story doing the rounds in the Sunday newspapers is that Egg, the Internet bank, is the target of another American Financial Giant Citigroup. The Prudential has talked down the offer as speculative this morning and has said it wants to concentrate on fully integrating Egg into its own operations. Despite having 3.5 million customers and an impressive 6% share of the credit card market, Egg still makes large losses.
Going back to Barclays, one shock piece of news last week was that Jeremy Masding the Chief Executive of the Secured Loans wing Firstplus has stepped down.
A Barclays spokesperson said: “Jeremy Masding has decided to step down from his role at FirstPlus to pursue opportunities outside the Barclays Group. Jeremy has made a fantastic contribution to Barclays, Barclaycard and FirstPlus during his 22 years with us. We wish him all the best.”
Masding is oft reported to having been doing well with Firstplus and the group was voted the 12th best place to work in a Sunday Times opinion poll. For what its worth 83% of his staff said his was doing a good job in the same poll.
