When we meet in Credit Suisse’s West End office, Jim Amine has just arrived in London from New York, and miraculously shows no sign of jet lag. The son of a US diplomat who spent a lot of time in Middle Eastern war zones, Amine practically grew up on a plane. But Credit Suisse’s chief executive of investment banking and capital markets' stamina is not restricted to air travel.

As an attorney in the mid-1980s at Cravath Swaine & Moore, the elite US law firm, Amine earned a reputation for long hours even in the harried world of corporate law. “There's a story that goes around Cravath that in one year I set a record for corporate associates, where I billed over 4,000 hours. If you do the math on that, you can see the sort of life I had,” he says.