Barclays chief executive officer CS Venkatakrishnan defended the firm’s investment banking division, the latest sign that an ongoing strategy review is unlikely to result in sweeping changes at the British bank.

Venkatakrishnan said his firm’s investment bank unit had been “extraordinarily successful” in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said when he offers investors an update next month, his focus will be on boosting efficiency, a move that might disappoint investors hoping for a more radical shake up.

The size of Barclays’s investment bank has been a source of debate among investors because it consumes large amounts of capital compared with other, higher-returning parts of the bank’s business. The firm is one of the leading providers in the debt capital markets business and has grown its presence in financing and prime in recent years. 

In a separate event with the Wall Street Journal, Venkatakrishnan said Barclays will likely have to grow other divisions such as retail banking in order to shrink the investment banking unit’s share of the firm’s overall business and boost its share price. 

“For you to get the right valuation, for that it has to be a proportionally smaller part of your bank,” Venkatakrishnan said at the newspaper’s event. “We’ve got to make the other divisions of the bank as strong as the IB.”

That reiterated earlier comments from executives reported by Bloomberg that the unit is sucking up too much capital relative to other parts of the bank. 

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Barclays tends to be clients’ first port of call when they’re looking to bank with a non-US entity, Venkatakrishnan said. “The UK has been a global financial center for 300 years, we’ve been part of that for 300 years, so I am optimistic that our clients value that.”

Barclays has been reviewing its strategy for months as part of efforts to improve the British bank’s lagging share price. 

The company has already said it would incur charges for the fourth quarter tied to a number of “structural cost actions” it’s taken to improve profitability. Marina Shchukina, the firm’s head of investor relations, has emphasized those moves would be in focus at the investor update and “we’re not embarking on a multi-year restructuring here, that is not our intention,” she said.

“We are going to have to be more efficient,” Venkatakrishnan said. “That US$1 billion in structured savings was one part of that. As we continue to look at our businesses, we will continue to strive for efficiency and improvement to the quality and types of revenue.” 

Last month, Qatar’s wealth fund disclosed it had sold some of its Barclays stake. Asked on the reasons for that Venkatakrishnan declined to comment on individual shareholders but said large investors “are asking the questions we aim to answer, which is what do you think your financial return targets are and how do you look to achieve them? How do you manage to run this bank in a sustainable way?”

Despite Venkatakrishnan’s backing, Barclays has already warned that the final three months of 2023 were challenging for its traders and investment bankers. Rivals including Citigroup and Bank of America posted steeper-than-expected drops in revenue from fixed-income trading, a business Barclays has long dominated. BLOOMBERG