Barclays traces its origins back to 1690 when John Freame, a Quaker, and Thomas Gould started trading as goldsmith bankers in Lombard Street, London. The name "Barclays" became associated with the business in 1736, when James Barclay, the son-in-law of John Freame, one of the founders, became a partner in the business. In 1728 the bank moved to 54 Lombard Street, identified by the 'Sign of the Black Spread Eagle', which in subsequent years would become a core part of the bank's visual identity. Much of the wealth of the Barclay family was founded on the slave trade: David and Alexander Barclay were engaged in the slave trade in 1756; David Barclay owned a great plantation in Jamaica, later freeing his slaves and coming to appreciate their equivalence to whites. In 1776 the firm was styled "Barclay, Bevan and Bening" and so remained until 1785, when another partner, John Tritton, who had married a Barclay, was admitted, and the business then became "Barclay, Bevan, Bening and Tritton". In 1896 several banks in London and the English provinces, notably Backhouse's Bank of Darlington and Gurney's Bank of Norwich, united under the banner of Barclays and Co., a joint-stock bank.
Today, Barclays is a British multinational bank and financial services company headquartered in London. It is a universal bank with operations in retail, wholesale and investment banking, as well as wealth management, mortgage lending and credit cards. It has operations in over 50 countries and territories and has around 48 million customers. Barclays is organised into four core businesses: Personal & Corporate (Personal Banking, Corporate Banking, Wealth & Investment Management), Barclaycard, Investment Banking and Africa. Barclays traces its origins to a goldsmith banking business established in the City of London in 1690. James Barclay became a partner in the business in 1736. In 1896 several banks in London and the English provinces, including Backhouse's Bank and Gurney's Bank, united as a joint-stock bank under the name Barclays and Co. Over the following decades Barclays expanded to become a nationwide bank. In 1967, Barclays deployed the world's first cash dispenser. Barclays has made numerous corporate acquisitions, including of London, Provincial and South Western Bank in 1918, British Linen Bank in 1919, Mercantile Credit in 1975, the Woolwich in 2000 and the North American operations of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Barclays has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange. According to a 2011 paper by Vitali et al., Barclays was the most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition with AXA and State Street Corporation taking the 2nd and 3rd position, respectively. On 12 June 2009, Barclays sold its Global Investors unit, which included its exchange traded fund business, iShares, to BlackRock for US$13.5 billion. Standard Life sold Standard Life Bank plc to Barclays plc in October 2009. The sale was completed on 1 January 2010. On 11 November 2009, Barclays and First Data, a global technology provider of information commerce, had entered into an agreement according to which Barclays would migrate a range of card portfolios to First Data's issuing and consumer finance platform. On 13 February 2010, Barclays announced it would pay more than £2 billion in bonuses. In March 2011 it was reported that Barclays had overtaken Santander UK to claim top spot as the UK's most complained against bank, with the country's official banking regulator, the Financial Services Authority having recorded 276,315 new customer complaints against Barclays Bank during the second half of 2010. Barclays nevertheless ranks only third in the UK among the mainstream clearing banks in terms of the number of its branches. Inline with costs cut, Barclays cut 1,400 jobs during the first half of 2011 and cut another 1,600 jobs for the rest of 2011. In March 2012, the trading names of Barclays Capital, Barclays Wealth and Barclays Corporate were each changed to simply "Barclays", as part of an effort to simplify the operations of the company and to promote greater integration between its divisions. In June 2012 Barclaycard acquired Analog Analytics, a digital coupon and daily deal business similar to Groupon. In October 2012, Barclays announced it had agreed to buy the ING Direct UK business of the ING Group. The transfer of the business to Barclays was approved at the High Court on 20 February 2013 and ING Direct was renamed Barclays Direct and will be integrated into the existing Barclays business within two years. In February 2013, Barclays announced a net loss of £1.04 billion for 2012, its first annual loss in two decades, together with plans to cut 3,700 jobs, reduce annual costs by £1.7 billion, and scale back its retail banking activities in Europe and Asia. In May 2014 Barclays announced they would cut 19,000 jobs over 3 years with 12,000 jobs cut in 2014. Investment banking will cut 2,000 jobs in 2014 and up to 7,000 jobs totally in 2016 making the investment banking portion shrink from 50 percent in 2014 to 30 percent of Barclay's assets in 2016. Barclays announced in June 2015 that it would sell its US wealth and investment management business to Stifel for an undisclosed fee. Barclays sold its Retail Banking unit in Spain to Caixabank in 2014. At its peak, Barclays had 5,100 employees and 600 offices in Spain. In 2014 the bank had 2,800 employees and 270 offices. With the sale, Caixabank acquired around 550,000 new retail and private banking clients and 2,400 employees. In August 2015 it was announced that Barclays would become the first UK high street bank to start accepting bitcoin, with the bank revealing that it plans to allow users to make charitable donations using the virtual currency. In March 2016, it was announced that Barclays has plans to sell its Africa business amid falling profits. In April 2016, Barclays announced a deal that allowed its UK customers to use Apple Pay. In June 2017, following a five-year investigation by the UK's Serious Fraud Office covering Barclays' activities during the financial crisis of 2007–2008, former CEO John Varley and three former colleagues, Roger Jenkins, Thomas Kalaris and Richard Boath, were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and the provision of unlawful financial assistance.