To the victors, the spoils: a post-Lehman scorecard

By Clara Ferreira-Marques and Michael Flaherty

LONDON/HONG KONG (Reuters) - For Barclays and Nomura, the collapse of Lehman Brothers was the opportunity of the lifetime -- a chance to grab a seat at banking's top table as Wall Street's giants fell.

A year after their high-speed takeovers, Barclays is confident it is on course to fulfil long-held ambitions now it has a foothold in U.S. equity and mergers and acquisitions markets, and Lehman has already boosted its bottom line.

But Japan's Nomura, a conservative brokerage which went for Lehman in its own bid to become an international investment bank, is still hobbled by a lack of scale in the United States and insiders say lingering cultural differences are a burden.

"We knew we were crossing a line and we would never be able to go back," Barclays Capital President Jerry del Missier told Reuters, speaking of frenzied negotiations as departing staff carried boxes of belongings across news broadcasts.

Speed was critical for both banks, not least to retain the talent and customer connections in the businesses they bought.

Having failed to buy all of Lehman, Barclays days later acquired its core U.S. broker-dealer out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Nomura bought European and Asian assets the following week.

A week after Barclays' acquisition, in the throes of the worst market turbulence in decades, it had named its top team. Nomura integrated the new structure in 70 days -- much faster than the 100 it had targeted.

"We wanted to send a powerful message to the marketplace that we were going to get the Lehman businesses up and running," Del Missier said in an interview. "We had clients to worry about, our own risk positions we needed to manage -- and the environment was incredibly volatile."