"We can only do well if the communities where we live and work prosper"

When COVID-19 hit the UK in early 2020, Barclays was faced with a twin challenge: keeping colleagues safe, and continuing to function smoothly for millions of clients and customers. Ashok Vaswani, Barclays CEO of Consumer Banking and Payments, explains how being a purpose-led organisation helped the bank navigate the pandemic.

“If, in normal times, organisations had been asked to do this, it would have taken six months just to put together a PowerPoint deck to talk about what it really meant,” says Ashok Vaswani.

Barclays’ CEO of Consumer Banking and Payments is reflecting on the mammoth task of suddenly shifting the vast majority of the bank’s huge workforce and operations to working from home and offering ‘virtual’ provisions when the global pandemic hit in the first part of this year.

Vaswani has completed a decade at Barclays, including as CEO of Barclays UK. Initially, he says, the bank’s response to the crisis was all about resilience: “How do you make the bank stand up and function despite us all not being in the office?”

He continues: “Huge kudos to our technology team. Suddenly we go from a few thousand to nearly all of our employees working from home. Getting everything functioning for tens of thousands of people in a few short weeks was just a remarkable feat.”

And this, says Vaswani, was just a first step. After that, the executive suite had to figure out the implications of a fast-moving, unprecedented and often traumatic situation for clients and customers: “Matters like liquidity and what’s happening to businesses and the advice we could give became critical.”

Attention then turned to “trying to help the government implement CBILS and the Bounce Back Loans, and at a very, very fast pace”. Supporting these schemes, Barclays facilitated over £24bn of funding to businesses and delivered support packages to customers including mortgage, loan and credit card payment holidays.

Colleague wellbeing in the pandemic

“At the same time,” Vaswani adds, “we were concentrating on our colleagues’ wellbeing, because, ultimately, in a bank it’s all about people and if our people are fine, we are fine. If they’re not fine, then we’re not either.

“Colleague welfare is exceedingly important; meeting the service needs of our customers is exceedingly important. The point is, how can you do both in the most safe and efficient way? You try to achieve both objectives, but in a way that dramatically minimizes the risk.”

Vaswani says the biggest lesson he’s learned helping to manage Barclays through the pandemic is about the quality of his team: “The colleagues I work with give me the strength to go ahead. Hopefully, my colleagues feel that I'm there to provide them the support when they need it too. And everyone senses that we shall overcome the worst event in our lifetime by coming together as a team to deal with it.”

By the time the second UK lockdown came in November, Vaswani says that what was most on his mind was “COVID fatigue, and the mental health of our employees. I myself have gone through a lot of ups and downs; I can understand other colleagues having gone through similar things. And thank goodness, there is light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccine. Because it's been a very difficult experience for lots of people.”

Long a tech evangelist, Vaswani acknowledges the vital role it has played in helping banks work through the pandemic. “I would dread to think of something like this happening 10 or 15 years ago, without video conferencing. Technology has changed and continues to change. It’s allowed us to deal with the pandemic much better – from the development of vaccines through advances in cloud and analytics right down to the way we live and interact.”

“Because we’re strong, we’ve been able to help others”

Another aspect that has helped Barclays weather the global crisis and continue to deliver profits each quarter is the bank’s longstanding diversified business model, containing retail and investment banking arms. “Since the global financial crisis, the consumer side of the house was doing well, and it was tough on the markets side. But now the model has paid off very rich dividends. Our CEO Jes Staley has always said that having a diversified business model makes a lot of difference. And here is living proof of that case.”

“I always believe you can help others only if you're strong yourself,” he adds, “and because we are strong, we've been able to take care of our colleagues, we've been able to take care of clients, we've been able to take care of our customers and we've been able to set up a £100m COVID-19 Community Aid Package.

Like every business, Barclays is having to respond to changing consumer behaviour as a result of the pandemic – and is also feeding insights about adapting to customer needs into its work with clients, to help them spot opportunities to stay resilient and alert to new possibilities. And, even in a year when working practices have been upended, Barclays has maintained its purpose-led focus. The key to this, says Vaswani, is answering the question: ‘How can we help people get the things done in their life that really matter to them?’

“Whether it is helping big clients raise money; whether it is payment holidays; whether it is promoting the government schemes; whether it is providing analytics to companies so that they can understand what their customers are doing; whether it’s the community fund: our commitment is that we will continue to do everything that we can. We sincerely believe that we can only do well if the communities we provide to and where we live and work, prosper.

“It’s our commitment to try and do everything that we can to help that to happen.”