Nearly 10 years ago, in a provocative report entitled French banks: are they any good?, a French banks analyst at Merrill Lynch came to a scathing conclusion about his country’s two largest investment banks. The sad fact, he wrote, was that the investment banking businesses at BNP Paribas and Societe Generale were “too big to be ignored, but too small to count on the world stage”.

After a decade in which both banks have tried to expand beyond their chosen specialist fields (fixed income for BNP Paribas and equity derivatives for SocGen), and after a torrid 2011, the original question can be posed again.