European lenders have stepped up their recruitment of senior Wall Street bankers as they try to halt a decade of lost market share in dealmaking and capital raising.
Barclays has hired Mike Joo, co-head of global investment banking at Bank of America, as co-chief executive of its own investment bank alongside Adeel Khan. The appointments take effect from February 2027 and are subject to regulatory approval.
Joo will be based in New York and lead investment banking, while Khan will continue to run global markets from London, Bloomberg reported. Both will sit on the group executive committee, Barclays said.
The pairing ends the four co-head structure the British bank adopted in 2024. Cathal Deasy and Taylor Wright, the two co-heads tasked with lifting the division’s performance, would stay in post until Joo arrives, according to an internal memo.
Barclays group chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan said the investment bank had been “growing revenues and returns” since 2023.
Deutsche Bank has made eight equity hires in the US so far this year, alongside one in London and one in Hong Kong, according to figures the bank gave ION Analytics. The recruitment forms part of a plan set out at an investor event in November 2025 to add up to 60 people across its equities business over three years.
Santander assembled much of its US investment bank the same way, taking on about 150 bankers from Credit Suisse as the Swiss lender was absorbed by UBS in 2023.
The hiring has yet to reverse the trend. European banks’ share of global investment banking fees, the pool covering mergers, acquisitions and capital raising, fell to 21 per cent in 2025 from 29 per cent in 2015, while the US share rose to 51 per cent from 46 per cent, LSEG data showed.
That share slipped again to 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest of any annual figure since LSEG records began in 2000. The American share reached 54 per cent.
Consultancy Oliver Wyman estimated European banks’ share of capital markets revenue at 32 per cent in 2025, down from 41 per cent in 2012. Their share of trading revenue has held steadier, at 31 per cent of the combined US and European total between 2021 and 2025, according to Coalition Greenwich.
Analysts expect European investment banking revenue to grow this year on volatile markets and busier dealmaking, though the region’s lenders continue to lose share to US firms, Reuters reported in May.
UBS was the exception in the first quarter, with investment bank revenue up 27 per cent year on year to $4.05 billion (€3.49 billion) on the strength of a record period for its trading arm. Its chief financial officer Todd Tuckner attributed the result to a “capital-light approach”.
Rival European banks lean more heavily on fixed income and balance sheet-intensive financing, where American firms can deploy capital freed up by lighter regulation at home. Proposed US changes to the Basel III and GSIB surcharge rules could cut capital levels at Wall Street banks by about 4.8 per cent, against an original plan that had envisaged increases of 20 per cent.
Venkatakrishnan told reporters in April that the wider that gap grew, “the greater the competitive friction we’re going to have to overcome”.
Barclays runs the largest investment bank headquartered outside the US, a business assembled from the North American operations of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and contested by its own shareholders ever since. Under a three-year plan launched in February 2024, the group targeted £2 billion (€2.34 billion) of gross efficiency savings by 2026 and pledged to move £30 billion (€35.09 billion) of capital towards UK retail, corporate lending and private banking.
The bank ranked sixth globally for investment banking fees this year, generating an estimated $2.7 billion (€2.33 billion) between January and mid-August, the Financial Times reported.
The European Commission has meanwhile made deeper capital markets the centrepiece of its savings and investments union, adopted in March 2025. About 70 per cent of EU household savings, worth some €10 trillion, sit in low-yield bank deposits rather than in capital markets, the Commission said.
European households save €1.4 trillion a year against €800 billion in the US, yet about €300 billion of that flows into non-EU markets, European Commissioner for Financial Services Maria Luís Albuquerque said when the strategy was presented.
Brussels opened a consultation on February 11, 2026 on the competitiveness of the EU banking sector, covering how far its banks can compete globally and how the single market and banking union might be deepened. The findings are due to feed a Commission report on the sector scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.
Most of the recruitment has been directed at New York and London. The UK left the EU in 2020, though a European Parliament report has since acknowledged that the City remains a global financial centre and that far fewer jobs relocated to the bloc than had been forecast.
