LONDON (Reuters) – Barclays has opened a new ‘campus’ site in Glasgow, comprising workspace, amenities and a street food market, as it aims to lure top software engineering talent to the hub in the new world of hybrid working.
The British lender has expanded its workforce in the Scottish city by 90% in the last four years and is on track to have around 5,000 staff at the new site by 2023, it said.
The campus in Tradeston, Glasgow will house Barclays’ technology, operations and functions teams, as part of a new global strategy of clustering tech workers in campus sites that combine workspace with other amenities to make them more appealing.
The lender has similar sites in the United States in Whippany, New Jersey, and in the Indian city of Pune.
“I’m asked all the time how we are doing in the war for talent for investment bankers, and my answer is I don’t have any problem there, my worry is the war for talent for engineers,” Barclays Chief Executive Jes Staley told Reuters.
“These three campuses, but Glasgow in particular, were designed and constructed to allow Barclays to be in the forefront of re-engineering the financial offering we provide customers and clients,” he said.
Central to the appeal of Glasgow as a location is that it had the highest proportion of female managers of any Barclays location, Staley said, partly because of short commute times compared to other cities such as London.
That allowed mothers to balance commuting with child care.
Staley said that despite Glasgow becoming the bank’s main technology hub in Britain, London will retain its role as the lender’s centre for investment banking and trading.
(Reporting By Lawrence White; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
