Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Icap, is building a new house in Kenya that will lie just seven minutes – latitude not travelling time – from the equator. One minute is one 60th of a degree, so that’s pretty close. It is an appropriate location for a man who, since setting up Intercapital in 1986 – and through the successive mergers with Exco and Garban in the 1990s, has built a business now worth nearly £3bn and an estimated personal fortune of more than £500m by being at the centre of things.

Icap is now one of a handful of brokers that ferociously compete to sit between the largest investment banks and handle the trading of over-the-counter derivatives, a market worth $583 trillion as of June last year, according to the Bank for International Settlements.