Senior bankers at Deutsche Bank in the US are the latest to voice their optimism over “green shoots” of recovery in the financial services industry, predicting that investment banking fees have bottomed out and should slowly start to increase on the back of increased mergers and acquisitions and a flurry of recapitalisations in the equity markets.

During the tail end of the boom, between January and July 2007, the average monthly fee pool was €4.9bn ($6.9bn) according to a Deutsche Bank analysis of data from Dealogic, the investment banking research provider.