The wealth and investment management division of Barclays has added private banker Michael Egan to its Manchester office as part of its growth plans for the northwestern region.

Egan joins Barclays from IM Asset Management, a division of Irwin Mitchell Solicitors, where he had specialised Court of Protection and Personal Injury Trust investments. This role, which he held for four years, entailed responsibility for some 120 clients and £100 million (£162 million) of assets under management.

In his prior career Egan was a wealth manager at HSBC and RBS Private Banking, advising clients in Manchester and then Sheffield.

Barclays, like a number of its peers, has been rapidly expanding in the UK regions in recent years to tap the growing wealth outside the capital. In addition to Manchester, in the past few months Barclays has added to its wealth management teams in Reading, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Essex. In the northwest it has an office in Liverpool, in addition to Manchester, while in the northeast there are bases in Newcastle and Leeds. The Manchester office now has a headcount approaching 50.

In a particularly noteworthy regional hire, earlier this month Barclays added private banker Cecelia Russell to its Birmingham office.

Russell was recruited under Barclays’ Embark initiative, which brings in staff from other industries and trains them to become wealth managers. She was latterly post-graduate programmes manager at Warwick Business School, a role in which she ran a portfolio of finance-related Masters courses.