It is more than a year since sweeping changes were waved in under Europe’s landmark Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, and the bond between asset managers’ clients and the hundreds of equity analysts whose job it is to churn out stock research for them has held firm.

Even though asset managers facing higher costs did cut many long-standing relationships with brokers, putting pressure on revenues, the trickle of mergers did not bring about what many predicted — a flood of analyst redundancies.