Barclays PLC announced Wednesday it agreed to sell its benchmarking business to Bloomberg for £520 million ($791.6 million).
The business, Barclays Risk Analytics and Index Solutions Ltd., incorporates the Barclays family of indexes including the Barclays aggregate bond indexes.
Jes Staley, Barclays CEO, said in a news release that Barclays will maintain a co-branding arrangement with Bloomberg on the benchmark indexes for five years following the expected closing of the purchase in the middle of 2016.
Barclays will keep its quantitative investment strategy index business, while it will outsource the calculation and maintenance of its indexes to Bloomberg.
BRAIS also includes the intellectual property of Barclays’ POINT portfolio analytics tool, which Barclays will operate for 18 months following the closing of the merger to assist clients in transitioning to other providers, the news release said.
Tom Hoskin, Barclays spokesman, was not available by press time, and officials at Bloomberg could not be reached by press time.