(Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc’s Jes Staley has a stronger case to fend off the British lender’s activist shareholder after another positive set of results at its investment bank.

The securities unit, the division at the center of Staley’s growth plan, saw fixed income, currency and commodities income substantially outperform U.S. peers in the third quarter, rising almost 10 percent. Equity trading revenue surged 35 percent, the bank said Wednesday, beating the 7.7 percent average growth pace posted by U.S. banks in the quarter.

Staley, 61, is a believer in investment banking after spending over 30 years at JPMorgan Chase & Co., and has bet his reputation on boosting returns at the division. Revenue had sputtered after he took the helm of the bank in 2015, and since last spring, he’s been pressured by activist investor Edward Bramson. Now, as performance recovers, the bank is returning more capital.

“We’ll be meeting with Ed in the next couple of weeks,” Staley said of Bramson in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “I look forward to his ideas.” The activist has yet to articulate specifics of his strategy, the CEO said.

Barclays also said it planned to redeem some U.S. preferred shares from 2008, lowering its financing costs. It also repeated its intention to pay a 6.5 pence dividend for 2018.

Staley has previously said the bank’s board is “100 percent supportive” and retreating from his plan is out of the question. Yet, Bramson has argued the board may be open to changing a strategy that he says relies too much on one-time items to boost profit. Bramson’s Sherborne Investors holds about 5 percent of the British bank.

Third-quarter operating net income of 4.88 billion pounds beat the company-compiled estimate of 4.69 billion pounds. Equities revenue of 471 million pounds ($611 million) beat analysts’ 461-million-pound average estimate.

The bank has begun the process of seeking a replacement for Chairman John McFarlane, who hired Staley and has backed him through several years of middling results and a scandal where the CEO attempted to unmask a whistleblower.

To contact the reporters on this story: Stefania Spezzati in London at sspezzati@bloomberg.net;Donal Griffin in London at dgriffin10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ambereen Choudhury at achoudhury@bloomberg.net, Keith Campbell, Ross Larsen

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