News Releases

LONDON – Barclays Capital, the investment banking division of Barclays Bank PLC, today announced the launch of its Swap Indices family, comprising both Nominal and Inflation Swap Indices. The nominal family incorporates both coupon-paying and zero-coupon swaps; the inflation family includes both real-rate and zero-coupon inflation swaps.

Serkan Bektas, Head of Barclays Capital’s Pension Solutions Group, said:

“The indices are a key development in our liability driven investment (LDI) offerings to pension funds and further enhance our position as a leading LDI execution counterparty and provider of asset liability management (ALM) services.   The indices provide pension funds, their consultants and LDI managers with the building blocks needed to create benchmarks tailored to a specific liability profile. By putting together a combination of our underlying indices, a pension fund can effectively establish a benchmark which looks to replicate the nominal and real rate sensitivity of a fund's liabilities.   This is a powerful tool for pension funds and will help them establish a relevant and transparent investment framework for their LDI managers.”

Both sets of indices are available in the full range of tenors and also in the following currencies: Sterling, Euro and US dollar.  Individual indices track the performance of monthly rolling exposure to a swap of the particular tenor.  Funded indices, which are calculated with a cash component attached, are also available to clients.

Waqas Samad, Head of Index Products at Barclays Capital, added:

“We are committed to providing our clients with a full suite of index products that enables them to benchmark and manage their portfolios efficiently and transparently. Our new Swap Index families complement our widely-used benchmark nominal and inflation-linked bond index families in a way that allows us to create custom benchmarks for portfolios that are tailored to our clients’ needs. These synthetic indices also provide us with a highly-liquid set of building blocks with which to implement our range of alpha-generating index strategies.”

Ralph Segreti, Global Inflation-Linked Product Manager, commented:

“The debut of the Barclays Capital Swap Indices is an important advance in both our product offerings and the viability of these types of solutions for pension plans and others. The availability of indices backed by Barclays Capital’s market-leading pricing in inflation, combined with a finer level of granularity in terms of tenor, means that investors can now adopt swap indices with confidence, knowing that their liabilities are being better matched and therefore more accurately hedged.”

Comprehensive levels, returns and analytics data for Barclays Capital’s swap indices are calculated daily and are available on Bloomberg (BSWI, BSWN, FSWI, FSWN, which will all be available through a menu page BSWM).

Ends

For further information, please contact:

Will Bowen, Barclays Capital Communications
+ 44 20 7773 3250
will.bowen@barclayscapital.com

Kristin Friel, Barclays Capital Communications
+1 212 412 7521
kristin.friel@barclayscapital.com

Notes to editors:

About Barclays Capital’s Inflation-linked offering

Barclays Capital is a leader in inflation-linked products. We are a key market maker in global inflation-linked securities, a top-tier lead manager of issuance and a major innovator in this asset class across cash, derivatives and structured note products. We have one of the largest inflation-linked bond franchises globally, devoting significant resources to origination, trading, research and analytical tools. We have earned widespread recognition for our expertise and innovation in this important segment of the fixed income market.

Barclays Capital has led the way in supporting and advising on the issuance of and investment in inflation-linked bonds. In Europe, Barclays Capital was involved as lead manager in the first French government bond issues linked to French inflation and eurozone inflation. We are also a leader in the inflation-linked derivatives market.

Barclays Capital also has a global research team dedicated to the inflation-linked asset class focusing on all aspects of bond and inflation derivatives.

We offer extensive web-based analytics for clients, making available our substantial inflation-linked bond database, complete with on-line tools to interrogate and chart the information. We also provide interactive forward rate, carry and breakeven protection analysis.

About Barclays Capital

Barclays Capital is the investment banking division of Barclays Bank PLC, which has an AA long-term credit rating and a balance sheet of over £1.1 trillion (US$2.3 trillion*). With a distinctive business model, Barclays Capital provides large corporate, government and institutional clients with solutions to their financing and risk management needs. Barclays Capital has offices in 26 countries, employs over 15,700 people and has the global reach and distribution power to meet the needs of issuers and investors worldwide.

For further information about Barclays Capital, please visit our website www.barclayscapital.com.

*US$ figure was derived using the US$/£ exchange rate at 30 June 2007 of US$2.01/£1