Foreign banks boost their US push

Both BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital are beefing up their push into the highly competitive US fixed-income markets by setting up new regional offices there to get closer to key institutional clients. Barclays Capital CEO Bob Diamond opened his bank’s new institutional sales office in Boston at the beginning of last month and BNP Paribas set up a fixed-income institutional sales desk in San Francisco at the end of June.

The Boston office will have six staff serving the northeast of the US, led by Tom Dimond and Robert Earl, both hired from Goldman Sachs in April.