“What I love about this business,” he says, “is that it’s constantly changing – and you have to change too. As soon as you start telling old codger stories about the good old days, you’ve had it.”
Harkness was elevated to vice-chairman of Barclays Capital in February, a promotion that chief executive Robert Diamond said reflected Harkness’s “multi-faceted” role both with clients and in the firm’s government bond business.
Certainly there’s been no shortage of variation in Harkness’s career. He reckons he must be one of the few people in the City who has worked as a stockbroker (for gold shares), in the futures pits, in a discount house and as a stockjobber. But then you also won’t Find all that many Financiers who can run through an authentic Maori war dance – a ritual Harkness learnt as a rugby player in New Zealand in the 1960s.
Harkness is modest and quietly spoken – although reputedly also a good man at a party.
He was born in 1949 in Christchurch, New Zealand, where his father was a stockbroker. A talented rugby player, he played Flanker for both Christchurch and Canterbury (the province). After school he spent a year as a VSO in Fiji, and a further 18 months in Africa, which included a stint in the Financial markets in Johannesburg and six months running a hotel in the Kalahari desert in Botswana. After arriving in London in 1972, he soon gravitated towards the City and found a job arbitraging gold shares between London and South Africa.
The following year he joined Union Discount, one of the few City Firms whose employees still wore top hats. “You’d get all the labourers throwing bricks at you,” Harkness recalls, “and the tourists taking pictures.
I’ve still got the hat – I use it for Ascot.”
Harkness traded money market instruments and moved into gilts following the sterling crisis. It was, he remembers “a natural habitat – I just loved the whole market environment”. Early in the 1980s, Harkness was involved in establishing Union Discount’s presence on LiVe, and spent several spells in the pit in Chicago to see how it worked. He ran Union Discount’s futures operation until 1984, when he went back to trading in cash gilts. Just as he was about to go on the main board, he was approached by Jonathan Davie to become a partner in Wedd Durlacher, one of the two main stockjobbers of the time. (Harkness is one of only two people at Barclays Capital to have been partners of Wedd Durlacher.)
At Big Bang in 1986, Harkness became a managing director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW) Securities, and subsequently chairman of the gilt department. BZW’s gilt operation was tremendously successful: until two years ago it was frequently making 50% of the profits of the whole gilts market.
Since 1992, Harkness has been chairman of the Gilt-Edged Market Makers Association. During that period, the London market has undergone profound change, not least with the introduction of repos, in order to bring it into line with other international bond markets.
In his new job, Harkness will continue his advisory involvement in Barclays Capital’s gilts business as well as being directly involved in leading high-level client relationships for key borrowers and institutional investors.
“I still keep a desk on the Floor and I’m very much involved in day to day business,” he says. He also keeps himself Fit by getting up at Five every morning for a workout. His routine nowadays is a far cry from his days at Union Discount, when lunch would be rounded off with port and fudge.
