Barclays Performance

We believe everyone deserves the financial independence, security and opportunity that comes with a job – and a vibrant, skilled workforce ensures local communities and businesses can thrive.

In 2023 our programmes reached more than 3.27 million people around the world, unlocking the skills and employment opportunities people need to progress.

Through the next chapter of our LifeSkills programme, Barclays has committed to upskilling 8.7 million people and placing 250,000 people into work by the end of 2027.

In addition, Barclays’ Military and Veterans Outreach programme provides support to service personnel, veterans and their families to develop the skills they need to transition to civilian life, build careers beyond the military and grow their own businesses.

Our Digital Eagles programme, which upskilled more than 622,000 people in 2023, is enabling people to become more confident with technology and stay safe online.

Barclays is delivering skills and employment opportunities for people in the communities where we operate.

Barclays Private Bank and Wealth Management represents a significant opportunity to strengthen our retail and mass affluent franchise, linked to our strong consumer franchise and complementing our UK-centred Private Bank.

We will offer robust financial management tools, priced fairly, managed transparently, constructed simply and delivered efficiently, in order for our clients to grow wealth responsibly at each stage of their personal financial journeys.

The successful integration of Private Bank and Wealth Management in 2023 is helping build our advantage in reach and specialist capability.

Alongside the integration there has been an ongoing focus on enhancing the client experience, reflected in the launch of the Wealth Hub to 1.2 million Premier customers in Barclays UK, and providing UK Private Bank clients with an enhanced service experience.

On 1 May 2023 Barclays completed the transfer of its UK Wealth Management & Investments business to sit alongside the Private Bank.

The transition of 300,000 clients and 1,000 colleagues has created one of the largest bank-owned Private Bank and Wealth Management businesses in the UK.

With our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda in mind, we continue to attract candidates who possess the capabilities, critical skills and experience required to provide exceptional service to our customers and clients.

In 2023, our graduate intake was over 36% female, while our undergraduate Discovery Diversity Programme focused on showcasing successful career paths for underrepresented minorities.

At the end of 2023, 5.1% of UK and 21% of US colleagues were from underrepresented ethnicities, surpassing our ambitions two years early.

To hold ourselves accountable at a senior level we have set a new ambition to increase the number of Managing Directors from underrepresented ethnicities by 50% – to 84 in the UK and US combined by the end of 2025.

At the end of 2023 this was 55.

We are also progressing towards our ambition of 33% representation of women in senior leadership roles (Managing Directors and Directors) by the end of 2025.

In early 2024 we announced the formation of a new Energy Transition Group to support our ambition to be a leading adviser and financier to clients as they transition to a low- carbon future.

We understand that capital is critical for a successful energy transition and are focusing our financing to those clients actively engaged in the energy transition.

The scale of our business gives us the opportunity to help finance the energy transition – to use our global reach, products, expertise and position in the global economy to work with our clients, including those in the energy sector, as they transition to a low-carbon business model.

In 2023, we financed $67.8bn of Sustainable and Transition Finance, demonstrating good momentum towards our target of $1trn by the end of 2030.

In addition, Barclays’ Sustainable Impact Capital portfolio has a mandate to invest up to £500m of the Bank’s own capital in sustainability-focused start-ups by 2027, helping accelerate the transition towards a low-carbon economy.

We take our responsibility to protect our customers’ money very seriously and are proud to have one of the lowest scam rates and highest reimbursement rates in the industry.

This is due to our continued investment in robust security systems and our established programme to educate customers and prevent them from falling victim to scams.

We have a dedicated Fraud and Scams hub on the Barclays website, which hosts a variety of content and resources to help the public learn how to keep themselves safe.

Additionally, for each of the 50 million+ payments our UK customers make every month, our fraud detection systems and machine learning models determine in less than a second if it is likely to be a fraudster rather than the customer, or if our customer appears at risk of being scammed.

If the transaction seems risky, the customer is presented with additional checks prior to the payment being released.

Customers are looking for more convenient, simpler ways to bank that fit their lives, including banking digitally: our mobile app has over 11.0 million active users.

Alongside our investment in technology enabling digital customers to access tools and products whenever they need them, we’re aiming to transform the role of physical locations across the UK to ensure non digitally engaged customers can still access banking.

We have launched our own initiatives, including a cashback without purchase service and Barclays Local - the largest network of alternative branch formats in the UK, with a presence in over 300 locations.

Alongside these changes, we are investing in multi-skilled training for our colleagues so they are better able to serve customers in ways that meet their needs today as well as breaking down internal barriers to enable quicker resolution of customer queries.

The new Consumer Duty marks the beginning of a step-change in UK consumer regulation, requiring firms to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers – a principle underpinning Barclays’ ambition of being a consistently excellent organisation delivering best-in-class service for customers and clients.

We have undertaken significant work to implement the Duty across the Group, and continue to embed this throughout the organisation.

We continue to use and enhance data and insights to ensure our strategy, products and services for retail customers deliver the intended outcomes, with a focus on meeting the needs of people with vulnerable characteristics.

For example, drawing on data and insights from our Rainy Day Saver product, we contacted over 1.2 million customers to advise them that alternative products may offer a better interest rate for balances over £5,000.

As reported in our 2022 Annual Report, towards the end of 2022, Barclays established a group- wide cultural change programme led by our Group Chief Executive, to set a standard of consistent excellence, recognising that both our stakeholders and management want Barclays to perform at a consistently very high level, each and every day.

This programme challenges colleagues to address five key areas – service, precision, focus, simplicity and diversity of thought – to establish a new operating standard.

The Board recognises that this cultural change programme is key to driving better outcomes for Barclays' stakeholders, including for our investors, customers, clients and colleagues.

In 2023, the Board received updates on the progress of this programme at each Board meeting, including the key levers necessary to achieve the required outcomes.

In July 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Consumer Duty came into force.

The Consumer Duty is a new outcomes-based regulation, designed to ensure relevant financial services firms deliver good outcomes for retail customers consistent with the three cross-cutting rules to (i) act in good faith, (ii) avoid causing foreseeable harm, and (iii) enable and support retail customers, and the four retail customers outcomes relating to: (i) products and services, (ii) price and value, (iii) consumer understanding, and (iv) consumer support.

The implementation of, and ongoing compliance with, the Consumer Duty is the responsibility of the operating entities within the Group, primarily BBPLC and BBUKPLC.

However, given the significance of the Consumer Duty, the Board also provides relevant oversight of the Consumer Duty across the Group.

The CIB continues to play a fundamental role in Barclays’ commitment to invest in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

This includes delivery towards the Group target to facilitate $1tn of Sustainable and Transition Financing by the end of 2030, providing green, sustainable and transition products and services that will support our clients and the global economy to accelerate the transition to net zero.

In 2022, we set a target of $1trn Sustainable and Transition Financing between 2023 and 2030 – encompassing green, social, transition and sustainability-linked financing, having met our previous target to facilitate £150bn of social, environmental and sustainability linked financing by 2025.

In the first full year of our new $1trn target by 2030, we have facilitated $67.8bnΔ, demonstrating good momentum.

A key way we support the financial resilience of vulnerable customers is through our focus on fraud and scams.

While overall rates of fraud and scams continue to rise across the sector, Barclays has one of the lowest scam rates and highest reimbursement rates in the industry, due to our investment in robust security systems and commitment to educating customers¹.

Our fraud detection systems can determine in less than a second if a payment is likely to be a fraudster rather than a customer, and we continue to invest in security features that protect against fraud and scams – including ‘App ID’, which allows customers to verify they are speaking to a Barclays colleague.

Barclays is a founding member of Stop Scams UK, a group made up of banks, telecoms and tech firms.

Continued investment in and focus on, enhancing digital propositions played an important role across our specialist businesses.

In USCB, mobile app enhancements – including enabling facial biometrics ID as part of app authentication – helped boost the Android app star rating to 4.7 out of 5 in 2023, up from 4 in 2022.

As further testament of improvements to our digital platform, our USCB Digital tNPS – a newly tracked metric for USCB measuring customer experience at the digital journey level – increased from 59.8 in 2022 to a full year average of 61.3 in 2023.

Similarly, in Barclaycard Payments we saw a 29% year-on-year increase in digital logins and a corresponding 10% reduction in customers using our call centres, supporting our increased efficiency.