“I’m very lucky,” says Samir Assaf, looking out over Canary Wharf from the 42nd floor of HSBC’s London headquarters. “I’m probably the last man standing in the business, at least in London, of all my peers.”

Assaf, who has been HSBC’s chief executive of global banking and markets since January 2011, has a point. Cast an eye over the individuals running the biggest European investment banks at the time he was appointed - including Anshu Jain at Deutsche Bank, Barclays Capital’s Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci, and UBS’s Carsten Kengeter - and Assaf is the only one still in place.