Macquarie stays long on Barclays, sees possible seismic shift in retail banking

(ShareCast News) - Barclays was taking the "correct" approach to defending its terrain in the Payments arena against the onslaught of new entrants into the market and was better placed than the more retail-facing lenders to withstand, some analysts believed.Following an investor lunch with Barclaycard Business Solutions chief Philip McHugh analysts at Macquarie said Barclays had - and rightly so - decided to embrace the changes underway and to ride the wave of opportunities.There is intense competition at both the consumer end of the payments chain and at the merchant or end-retailer side of things, from the likes of ApplePay and Google Wallet.At the latter end however the British bank believed its strong retailer relationships offered it a key competitive advantage.Nonetheless, the Australian broker thought Barclays should be more concerned about the risk of contagion into the higher-earning areas of banking."With companies like Google already owning 8% of peer-to-peer lender The Lending Club, it is far from given that the new entrants will not diversify into product areas, once they have hooked the customer with the core payments relationship."Likewise, should retail banking move largely towards the mobile that would represent a seismic shift for the industry."We do believe this is a far more negative theme for retail banks than those focused on the corporate sector, where more sophisticated relationships and non-standard products offer robust protection from new entrant attack," the broker concluded.Macquarie said it continued to be 'long' shares of Barclays (outperform with 310p target price) - its only 'outperform' in the UK sector - versus Lloyds ( 'underperform' with a target price of 75p).