BCS Stock Price: Barclays PLC crashes alongside the FTSE 100 on UK economic contraction woes

NYSE:BCS has definitely seen better days after a damning report from the Chancellor of the Exchequers showed that the UK’s economy will have contracted by over 11%, which marks the worst rate in over three-hundred years. Many of the country’s largest banks saw their stocks hit hard including Lloyds Banking Group (LON:LLOY), NatWest Group (LON:NWG), and HSBC (LON:HSBA). BCS has returned a loss of over 10% on the year so far to investors, which trails the benchmark S&P 500 by nearly 25% over the past 52-weeks.

Barclays has announced some recent developments in the services it is offering its customers. First, comes the new collaboration with FreshBooks, which provides cloud billing and accounting software to businesses, with a focus on the small-to-medium-sized business sector. Secondly, Barclays has teamed with CGI and the CGI Trade3560 system to provide a brand new equity trading platform for its clients. The new platform will be built upon cloud-based software that will allow users to have access to modern trade solutions with real-time data. 

BCS stock news

The news of the British economy is grim for its biggest banks and with expected unemployment in the country to rise heading into 2021, a vaccine for COVID-19 cannot come soon enough. Boris Johnson recently announced that the first doses of the vaccine could be available to citizens that are high-risk or elderly, by the first quarter of 2021. With British biotech giant AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) as one of the leading companies developing these vaccines, there is hope for a return to economic normalcy at some point before 2022.