The banks of United Kingdom will shut their retail financial services to their customers. This decision has been taken by the Barclays Plc, as they face higher cost for providing these services to their customers. These reports are claimed by the Financial Times.
 
This will be the end of going to the bank for financial help. The banks will end their retail financial advice services from the next week. All the high street banks are likely to follow Barclays Bank.
 

Thousands of customers of Barclays bank were not able to withdraw money from the cash machines and even not able to access their bank accounts due to a computer glitch.

The Barclays Bank is going to pay 298 million dollars for the settlement of the criminal charges that the bank has violated US sanctions at the time of its dealings with Sudan, Burma, Cuba, Libya and Iran.

The Bank was alleged with breaching the Trading with the Enemy Act and International Emergency Economic Powers Act in its dealings in between 1995 to 2006.

Barclays has reported an increase in pre-tax profit at Barclays by 47% to £1.82 billion in the first quarter. This was revealed by the bank prior to its annual general meeting this morning.

It has been stated that loan impairments dropped 35% to £1.5 billion. This is considerable reduction in comparison to the last year, which had been it bad by the recession.

The UK based banking giant Barclays has reported a 92% increase in its yearly profit for 2009. The sale of its BGI fund management arm to BlackRock, a US firm, in 2009, has boosted the profits.

The total profit came out to be £11.642 billion and the bonus payouts rose to £2.7bn, during the year.

Although the impairment charges for the year jumped to 49 %, the figure was below the bank's own estimate of nine billion pounds.

“Barclays will spread the impact of a one-off British tax on bankers' bonuses across its entire global investment bank workforce rather than just on London staff”, said a source, on Friday.

The investment banking arm Barclays Capital, joined several of its rivals including Deutsche Bank, in its decision that the staff in London will not be hit more than colleagues elsewhere in the business due to the tax.

Other noted banks, including Credit Suisse, have said most of the burden will be taken by London staff.