Offshore investment

Invest offshore with Barclays investment services

Finding the right offshore investments can be a key factor in making the most of your wealth. Our offshore investment strategy can give you opportunities to grow your wealth that are often not available in your home country. With a few well-advised decisions you could broaden your investment portfolio.

Barclays offers a range of investment services to offshore banking clients. These services include:

• Expert international offshore investment specialists
• Barclays Multi-Manager - an actively managed investment portfolio
• A variety of investment funds
• Commodity investment opportunities
• Currency trading facilities
• Offshore investment advice
• Global Beta - a passively managed investment portfolio
• Structured products

Offshore investment funds

With the wide selection of funds that we provide in our Barclays Multi-Manager Portfolios, we're confident we can match your needs with exactly the right offshore investments.

Barclays Multi-Manager

This is our 'one-stop' investment. You'll have a team of world-class investment professionals actively managing your funds within one portfolio that's easy to arrange and manage. The investment managers are carefully selected as specialists in particular sectors, so you'll get the latest investment insight, thinking and market modelling in each area of your portfolio. Additionally, each portfolio is carefully blended to suit different levels of risk and reward.

Barclays Multi-Manager - what it offers you

• The expertise of top investment managers in each market sector
• Continual monitoring of the performance of these managers
• A wide choice of portfolios for income, growth or a mixture of the two
• A wide spread of risk through our broad and diverse investment approach
• The opportunity to benefit from institutional investment strategies
• Confidence in investing with a secure established provider - Barclays Wealth and Investment Management is the UK's number one multi-manager provider in the UK, and one of the top three in Europe.

Offshore investment strategy

With Barclays Multi-Manager, you can adjust the asset allocation of your portfolio as your investment priorities change. Our international investment managers will help you to make strategic decisions with a level of insight and advice not easily available to private investors.

To put it simply - we aim to give you the right information and advice, so that you can make the investment decisions that are right for you.

But before you invest with us, we'll help you choose the right strategy. We'll look at how you see risk, what you want to achieve, and then help you decide what type of investor you are - cautious, balanced or adventurous. Once we've made that decision, we can help you design a portfolio that delivers growth, income, or a mixture of both. Whatever type of investor you consider yourself to be, we aim to deliver the best possible returns in line with the degree of risk with which you are comfortable.

As with all investments the value of the multi-manager funds can fall as well as rise.

Download the Barclays Multi-Manager brochure**

Barclays Global Beta Portfolios

Global Beta Portfolios* from Barclays are an alternative to Multi-Manager. They offer a range of globally diversified portfolios that invest in exchange traded funds, or ETFs. These are index-tracking investment funds traded on stock exchanges around the world. Each Global Beta portfolio holds a number of different ETFs in order to provide a balance of risk and return. They simply track an index, so the returns are not dependent on the performance of an active fund manager.

Available for a minimum investment of £25,000 (or currency equivalent) Global Beta Portfolios offer:

• Diversification - available in five different portfolios, each one designed accurately to match varying appetites for risk and reward
• Certainty of market returns - because each portfolio is linked to a variety of index-tracking investments, you have the certainty of getting a fair market return
• Choice - Global Beta enables you to invest in sterling, euros and/or US dollars
• Ease - we manage the asset allocation within the portfolio, meaning it is far less time-consuming to invest in Global Beta than to manage a series of individual ETFs
• The value of indexes can fall as well as rise and you could get back less than you invested.

Offshore investments

We also offer advice and execution of other investment products and services including structured notes and foreign exchange spots and forwards.

Structured Notes

Structured Notes are investment products you can trade which give returns linked to how an underlying asset or index performs. Typically available for a 3 to 5 year term, Structured Notes are also tradable on a secondary market making them a flexible investment option for more experienced investors, but you may get back less than you invested if you sell the Note before the end of the term. A measure of capital protection may also be included.

When trading on the secondary market you may have to pay more for the Note than the face value, therefore if you keep this to maturity you will get back less than you invested.

Structured Notes can be linked to:

• Stocks and shares
• Interest rates
• Investment funds
• Commodities (e.g. metals)
• Foreign currencies

Foreign Exchange Spots and Forwards

You may need to change money for payments or purchases in a foreign currency (e.g. buying property overseas), or to protect your overseas investments against unfavourable exchange rate movements (e.g. your income from businesses overseas). Or you may just want to trade currencies for profit (which carries certain risks - you may lose money).

We provide exchange facilities in most major currencies, including:

• Sterling, US dollars and euros
• Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, Hong Kong dollars, Japanese yen, New Zealand dollars, Singapore dollars and Swiss francs
• Other currencies on confirmed request

Offshore investment management

At Barclays, we aim to give you the information you need to help you make the right decisions regarding your offshore investments. By looking at your objectives and your attitude to risk, we can help you decide what sort of investor you are - cautious, balanced or adventurous - and whether you want growth, income, or a mix of both.