Elevating Barclays’ global profile

Barclays Global Investors wants to become a household name, and it is counting on Kathleen Taylor to lead the charge.

As head of a new global marketing division, Ms. Taylor, 46, is overseeing a print and television ad campaign designed to dramatically raise the profile of British bank Barclays PLC’s San Francisco-based money management unit.

The company intends to roll out the campaign before July. Ms. Taylor declines to be more specific on the timetable.

With $700 billion under management, it is the biggest institutional manager in the world of mutual funds for corporate and government pension plans, university endowments and charitable foundations.

In all, Barclays tracks 50 foreign markets and close to 1,000 indexes, but it continues to sail beneath the radar of many investors, even in the institutional world, Ms. Taylor says.

“We haven’t really done any advertising in the past,” she says, declining to divulge the campaign’s budget. “We want people to know about our size and what we can offer to the marketplace.”

In the ever-competitive world of financial services, many companies have also recently begun advertising just to keep their name out there, says David Gagie, marketing director at Auriemma Consulting in Westbury, N.Y.

“One of the major goals of financial services organizations today is to ensure their message is understood by institutional investors,” he says. “It has little to do with how products are designed and everything to do with how the company is perceived from the corporate angle.”

51 almost-ok funds

Along with ads designed to attract more pension plan sponsors, Ms. Taylor says Barclays will push its 51 new exchange-traded funds, which await approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company expects half of the funds to be available by spring, says Ms. Taylor. The rest will be rolled out before 2001.

Barclays is limiting its expanded retail strategy to the exchange funds, stresses company spokes-man Tom Taggart. “We specialize in product design and management. We aren’t interested in the distribution game,” Mr. Taggart says. “In the strictest sense, we aren’t going after retail.”

Ms. Taylor’s new assignment comes at a time when the company is facing pressure from sundry indexing funds emerging around the world. But many see her as a take-charge type who can get the job done.

Since 1995, she has been the managing director of business development for Barclays’ Canadian arm, BGI Canada.

She was largely responsible for expanding the client base to more than 120 institutional accounts with $22 billion, according to the company.

In 1992, she joined Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisers, which Barclays Global acquired in the early 1990s.

Earlier she co-founded and ran Trafalgar Capital Management, a Toronto quant house.

In her new role, Ms. Taylor will also focus on Barclays’ intranet, as well as how to make better use of the Internet.

She is spearheading the effort with a new chief information officer, Paul Stevens, who was recently hired from J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

The company is considering moving its human resources department online, for example, to cut costs. Other improvements include making each institutional fund’s holdings available over the Internet in real time to clients, who can already check the current value of their portfolios at the company’s website.

Management is also debating how better to connect the firm’s 11 offices, ranging from San Francisco to Toronto (where Ms. Taylor is based), to London, Australia and Japan.

Ms. Taylor says no final decisions have been made, but creating a globally accessible library of pension plan requests for proposal is on the drawing board.