This year’s Financial News Awards for IT Excellence may have coincided with the first anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ collapse and the start of the worst financial crisis in living memory, but there were reasons to be cheerful at last month’s event, at the City of London’s Plaisterers’ Hall.

The equity markets have since returned to some semblance of normality with the main indices recovering and volumes picking up while European volatility indices are trading in the same range as they were before the Lehman Brothers collapse.