Bankers to the Bush

From Tanganyika to Trinidad and from towering city branches to tiny one-room shacks in the bush, the 1,340 overseas offices of Britain's biggest bank carry the same inscription: "Barclays Bank D.C.O." Wags insist that the initials stand for "debtors, creditors and overdrafts." but in fact they stand for nothing. In 1954. as the British empire retrenched, Barclays prudently struck out "Dominion, Colonial and Overseas" from its longtime overseas title and left the meaningless initials. Today it is involved in a profitable partnership with onetime colonials that has raised its assets to $2.5 billion, a significant portion of the $9 billion assets of its parent, Barclays Bank Ltd. of London.

Such sums put the five-company "Barclays group" at the head of Britain's Big Five banks and only a notch below such overseas competitors as the U.S.'s First National City and Chase Manhattan. Off the ledger, however, Barclays is little like any of them. It dates back to 1694 as a private bank, but was put together in its present form in 1896. when it joined forces with 19 other small private banks. All retained a local autonomy, and even today Barclays' city headquarters at 54 Lombard Street in London is only one of 30 "head offices." Barclays Chairman John Thomson, 54, like many of Barclays' officers, is a member of an old banking family whose bank was absorbed by Barclays.

Brash, Happy Market. Barclays is the only big British bank that has branched overseas, altogether has 3,999 offices and 40,000 employees of every cut and color, concentrated outside Britain in Africa, Europe and the West Indies. "Here in Britain," says a Barclays executive, "we're a rather starchy lot. But out there we have a big, brash, happy sort of market." Barclays has learned to be as brash as the market. Departing from the hackneyed British custom of sending local advertisements to the hinterland, it has gone after African depositors with movie cartoons and commercials set to high-life music. Sample: "One of them farmers 'e go for Barclays Bank/And they keep him money well." The cartoons are leading attractions at theaters, have tripled savings accounts.

Barclays also pays careful attention to local custom. In Africa it uses mobile vans for its white customers in off-track communities, but has learned not to use them for Africans; they get suspicious when a truck drives off with their hard-earned shillings, and are apt to raise quite a fuss. For Africans, Barclays sets up offices wherever it can, even if they are only one-room huts. Barclays has learned the necessity of accepting the smallest deposit (one chief arrived with an entire tribal retinue to deposit $1.40) and of honoring some unusual checks, including one written on a hard-boiled egg and another on the side of a squealing piglet. The bank also stresses service; one isolated manager regularly cuts his best customer's hair because no barber is available. Encounters with lions, tigers and cobras are not unusual for Barclays employees, and neither are encounters with revolutionaries. Egypt's Nasser expropriated $10 million in Barclays assets, and local terrorists on Cyprus shot a Barclays manager dead.

Oxbridge Africans. But Africa is changing just as Barclays changed. Heads of government, such as Tanganyika's President Julius Nyerere. are respected customers both for their personal accounts and for government business; Barclays recently made a $5,000,000 loan to Tanganyika to develop electric power. To help emerging Africa. Barclays opens four new branches every month, donates scholarships, is training more African staffs and managers, and making $75 million in short-and long-term loans through a subsidiary called Barclays Overseas Development Corp. And aside from the up-country chiefs with $1.40 bank accounts, there are Africans, often Oxbridge educated, who now sit on Barclays boards.

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