There was a point during Deutsche Bank’s investor day last month when, in an otherwise lucid presentation, Colin Fan, the new co-head of the bank’s corporate banking and securities division, slipped into fluent bankerspeak: “One of the things that is hard to demonstrate on a two-dimensional piece of paper is the giving-up of optionality, convexity, whatever you want to call it. All of the things in the past we thought would be a good, cheap cost to maintain optionality: gone.”

To translate: what Fan calls "optionality" or "convexity", you or I would probably call "procrastination" or "stalling". But he is absolutely right: the time when banks could sit on their hands rather than rolling up their sleeves and re-engineering now defunct business models is surely drawing to a close.