LONDON — The head of investment banking for Asia at the British lender Barclays is stepping down as the bank prepares to radically reshape its business.
The executive, Matthew Ginsburg, who joined the bank in September 2009, is looking at other senior roles internally, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Ginsburg, a Boston native, is likely to pursue a position outside Asia, where he has spent the bulk of his career, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Mr. Ginsburg was the head of investment banking for the Asia-Pacific region at Morgan Stanley before joining Barclays.
Barclays declined to comment Thursday.
Andrew Jones, co-chief executive for the Asia-Pacific region, will assume the role as interim head of investment banking for Asia Pacific until a permanent successor is named, according to an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.
Mr. Ginsburg is the latest prominent executive at Barclays to seek a change as the bank prepares to substantially reduce the size of its investment banking business by slashing half of its capital and more than a quarter of its work force, or 7,000 jobs.
Last month, Hugh E. McGee III, the head of Barclays’s American operations and one of the firm’s top deal makers, left the bank.
Paul G. Parker, the firm’s head of mergers and acquisitions; Ros Stephenson, Barclays’s global chairwoman of investment banking; and Robert Morrice, the chairman and chief executive of Barclays’s Asia-Pacific arm, also have announced plans to leave the bank.
Barclays plans to shrink its investment bank as it faces a difficult fixed-income environment, lackluster returns and tougher regulatory requirements for how much capital it must hold.
The bank also has been hit hard by a series of embarrassing regulatory investigations and penalties — the most notable being the admission in 2012 that some of its employees colluded to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, including the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. The bank paid $450 million in penalties.
In hopes of increasing its returns and reducing its exposure to riskier businesses, Barclays will focus on four core areas: retail and corporate banking, primarily in Britain; credit cards; banking in Africa; and, to a lesser extent, investment banking.
The bank had previously announced plans to cut its 140,000-person work force by about 8 percent, or 12,000 jobs, this year. It now plans to eliminate 14,000 positions this year, and 19,000 in total over the next three years.
As part of those reductions, the investment bank, which employed 26,000 at the end of 2013, will cut 7,000 jobs by 2016.
The overhaul represents a turnaround from the empire-building ambitions of Robert E. Diamond Jr., the bank’s previous chief executive. Mr. Diamond was forced out under pressure from British regulators in 2012 during the Libor scandal.