Barclays Capital prepares trading platform in Europe

Barclays' investment bank arm plans to launch a European "dark pool" trading platform, building on its American platform to expand its equities business globally.

Rival banks such as Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse run in-house European "dark pools", electronic platforms that allow buyers and sellers of large orders of shares to avoid revealing pre-trade information and signalling their intentions to the rest of the market.

Dark pools, while increasing in popularity for large orders, have attracted criticism for lacking transparency, and European regulators are scrutinising the trading networks to see whether they provide fair pricing to investors and enough data to the market.

Barclays Capital intends to launch its operation in the third quarter and will be based on the American platform it inherited after buying operations from Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

It is called LX, or liquidity cross, and allows users a tiered access, where clients can specify acceptable counterparties.

BarCap has been traditionally strong in debt markets and is increasing equities and M&A advisory work to build on its American business. It has hired about 750 people in Europe in the last two years.