Do the almost simultaneous announcements this month of a new regime at Deutsche Bank, and an extensive restructuring at HSBC, symbolise a fundamental change in the structure of financial companies?

The last two decades of the 20th century saw the rise of integrated financial conglomerates. In Britain, the trigger was the Big Bang in 1986. In the US, the separation of investment and commercial banking imposed in the 1930s by the Glass-Steagall Act was steadily eroded. The universal banks of continental Europe, seeing these trends, reinvented themselves along Anglo-Saxon lines.

In Britain, the very large financial resources of retail banks meant that they were initially dominant operators, absorbing the partnerships that had dominated stockbroking, market making and investment banking. Few of these acquisitions worked out well. Stockbrokers, jobbers and corporate dealmakers did not much enjoy the culture of the retail bank. Many former partners in these firms, made very wealthy through the sale of their businesses, preferred to spend more time with their families. The revenue earners below, deprived of the opportunity to enjoy the icing on the cake, were unhappily nicknamed the “marzipan layer”.