Barclays PLC
Diversified Universal Banking and Financial ServicesFounded 1690- Updated June 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: June 2025
CorpDigest
Barclays PLC
Company History
Founded 2008 in London, United Kingdom
Last reviewed: 2025-06-05 · By Swet Parvadiya
The bank traces its founding to 1690, when goldsmith John Freame and merchant Thomas Gould began banking operations on Lombard Street in London. Barclaycard, launched in 1966, was the first credit card in the United Kingdom — a product that required convincing British consumers and merchants that revolving credit was not morally suspect, a social project as much as a commercial one.
John Freame (1665–1744) was a pioneering Quaker goldsmith and the principal architect of the institution that would eventually become Barclays PLC. Born into the Religious Society of Friends during a period of intense religious persecution in England, Freame was barred from attending Oxford or Cambridge and excluded from the traditional guilds that controlled most lucrative professions. Forced to the margins of mainstream society, he turned to the goldsmithing trade, which was rapidly evolving into the primitive banking sector of the 17th century. In 1690, alongside his fellow Quaker Thomas Gould, Freame opened a shop on Lombard Street in the City of London. This location would become the spiritual and physical home of Barclays for over two centuries. Freame's business model was revolutionary for its time; rather than merely melting and shaping gold, he began safeguarding the precious metals of the merchant class, issuing receipts that functioned as early banknotes, and providing short-term loans to facilitate the booming transatlantic trade routes. His success was largely due to the tight-knit Quaker network, which provided a reliable flow of capital and a built-in customer base that trusted his integrity implicitly. Freame's commitment to ethical commerce was absolute; he famously refused to finance the slave trade or the production of armaments, a moral stance that, while limiting certain lucrative opportunities, cemented his reputation as the most trustworthy banker in the Empire. His meticulous record-keeping, prudent risk management, and unwavering honesty forged a corporate culture that survived for centuries, providing the solid foundation upon which the modern Barclays empire was ultimately built.
Thomas Gould (1663–1731) was a highly respected Quaker goldsmith and the indispensable co-founder of the partnership that laid the genesis of Barclays PLC. Working in lockstep with John Freame, Gould was instrumental in establishing the firm's presence on Lombard Street in 1690, transforming a modest goldsmith's shop into a critical node in the emerging financial infrastructure of the British Empire. While Freame often handled the broader strategic vision and the cultivation of the Quaker network, Gould was the operational anchor and the technical expert in metallurgy and assaying. His deep understanding of the physical gold trade, combined with his extensive network within the Quaker merchant community, provided the firm with the initial capital and commercial credibility required to survive the volatile economic conditions of the late 17th century. Gould's partnership was characterized by a shared commitment to the Quaker principles of absolute integrity, fair dealing, and meticulous record-keeping. These values were not merely moral imperatives; they were highly effective commercial strategies in an era where counterparty risk was a constant threat. By ensuring that every transaction was backed by verifiable assets and executed with unimpeachable honesty, Gould and Freame created a level of trust that allowed their bank to flourish while less scrupulous competitors failed during periodic financial panics. Gould's early contributions were absolutely essential in forging the resilient, operationally disciplined foundation that allowed the firm to eventually evolve from a private goldsmithing partnership into a global joint-stock banking titan.
Quaker goldsmiths John Freame and Thomas Gould open their banking partnership on Lombard Street in the City of London, laying the foundational bedrock of modern commercial banking by issuing promissory notes and safeguarding merchant wealth.
James Barclay, the son-in-law of John Freame, is admitted to the partnership, and the firm officially adopts the Barclays name, setting the stage for its future dominance and expansion into financing the British industrial revolution.
In a massive cultural and legal shift for the conservative Quaker leadership, Barclays transitions from a private partnership with unlimited liability to a joint-stock company, allowing it to raise the massive capital required to expand its branch network across the UK.
Barclays expands its international footprint, opening branches across Europe and the Americas, and becomes a pioneer in the UK consumer credit market by launching one of the first bank-issued credit cards, fundamentally altering British consumer spending habits.
Following the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, Barclays aggressively expands its securities trading and corporate advisory capabilities, transitioning from a traditional commercial bank into a formidable player in the global capital markets.
Barclays acquires The Woolwich, the UK's second-largest building society, in a massive Â$5.7 billion deal, instantly cementing its dominance in the British mortgage market and significantly expanding its retail deposit base.
In a frantic weekend rescue during the height of the global financial crisis, Barclays acquires the North American operations of the collapsed Lehman Brothers, instantly transforming the bank into a global bulge-bracket investment bank.
Barclays is hit with nearly $500 million in fines by global regulators for its role in manipulating the LIBOR benchmark interest rate, leading to the resignation of the CEO and Chairman and forcing a complete overhaul of the bank's compliance culture.
Barclays completes the demerger of its massive African retail banking operations into the independent Absa Group, strategically retreating from emerging market retail banking to focus on its core UK and global corporate franchises.
Barclays executes a brilliant strategic purification by selling its massive US consumer credit card portfolio to Equifax, shedding low-return, capital-intensive assets to focus relentlessly on high-yielding corporate lending and elite fixed-income trading.
In a frantic weekend rescue during the height of the global financial crisis, Barclays acquired the North American investment banking and trading operations of the collapsed Lehman Brothers. The purpose was to instantly acquire a massive US balance sheet, elite technology infrastructure, and thousands of top-tier investment bankers, transforming Barclays into a global bulge-bracket powerhouse.
Barclays acquired The Woolwich, the UK's second-largest building society, in a massive Â$5.7 billion deal to instantly cement its dominance in the British mortgage market and significantly expand its retail deposit base, defending its market share against aggressive competitors like HBOS.
Barclays purchased the UK operations of ING Direct for Â$952 million to acquire a massive, high-quality portfolio of retail savings deposits and a rapidly growing online banking customer base, further strengthening its retail funding franchise in the aftermath of the European sovereign debt crisis.
Barclays acquired a majority stake in the South African financial services group Absa (then Amalgamated Banks of South Africa) to establish a dominant retail and corporate banking footprint in the rapidly growing African continent, leveraging its expertise in emerging market banking.
Barclays traces its origins to 1690 when John Freame and Thomas Gould opened a goldsmith-banking business in Lombard Street, London, dealing in gold, silver, and short-term loans. In 1736 James Barclay joined the business through marriage, lending his family name to the firm that would eventually become Barclays Bank. Over the following centuries the bank expanded through acquisitions of provincial English banks—absorbing 20+ local institutions between 1896 and 1916—and went public in 1896, growing into one of the UK's 'Big Four' clearing banks serving millions of retail customers by the post-war era.
The UK's 1986 'Big Bang' financial deregulation allowed Barclays to acquire stockbroker de Zoete & Bevan and market maker Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt for £100 million, creating BZW (Barclays de Zoete Wedd), the UK's first integrated investment bank. This transformation from retail lender to capital-markets participant was accelerated dramatically in 2008 when Barclays acquired Lehman Brothers' North American operations for $1.75 billion after Lehman's bankruptcy, instantly gaining 10,000 Wall Street staff and a top-tier US investment bank. The Lehman acquisition vaulted Barclays into the global bulge-bracket tier, transforming what was primarily a UK retail bank into a transatlantic investment banking competitor.
The LIBOR scandal erupted in June 2012 when Barclays admitted to manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate—the benchmark interest rate underpinning $350 trillion in financial contracts globally—paying a $450 million fine to US and UK regulators. Barclays traders had submitted artificially low or high LIBOR submissions to benefit their derivatives positions, and during the 2008 financial crisis senior management pressured submitters to post lower rates to conceal funding stress. CEO Bob Diamond resigned within days of the settlement, and the scandal triggered industry-wide investigations that ultimately cost 16 global banks $9+ billion in fines, fundamentally changing how benchmark rates are set and tarnishing Barclays' reputation for years.
Barclays sold its US credit card portfolio—primarily the co-branded Gap and Frontier Airlines cards—to Synchrony Financial in 2023 for approximately $2.4 billion as part of CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan's 'Barclays 2026' strategic plan to simplify the bank and improve returns. The US cards business required significant capital against loans with higher credit risk than UK operations, and without a US deposit franchise to fund the cards cheaply, Barclays was at a structural cost disadvantage versus American issuers. The sale reduced risk-weighted assets by $19 billion, freeing capital for UK-focused businesses and share buybacks, reducing Barclays' US dependence and improving its return on tangible equity targets.
On 27 June 1967, Barclays opened the world's first automated teller machine at its Enfield Town branch in north London, with British actor Reg Varney becoming the first customer to withdraw cash from the device. The machine was invented by John Shepherd-Barron, a Scottish engineer at printing firm De La Rue, who pitched the idea to Barclays chief general manager Sir Thomas Bland over a martini after being frustrated by Saturday banking hours. The original Barclaycash machine dispensed paper vouchers worth £10, validated by a coded cheque rather than the magnetic-stripe cards introduced later. The launch positioned Barclays as a technology leader two years before Lloyds, Midland, and National Westminster deployed comparable systems. The bank reinforced this lead in 1966 by launching Barclaycard, Britain's first credit card, modeled on Bank of America's BankAmericard scheme. By 1972 Barclays had also pioneered the first ATM using a plastic card with a personal identification number, designed by James Goodfellow. These innovations gave Barclays a retail technology edge that fed directly into the 1980s, when it became the first British bank to roll out a national network of cash machines, embedding the brand in everyday consumer finance and underpinning the Barclaycard franchise that today serves more than 10 million UK cardholders.