It wasn't that long ago that it would have been unthinkable to consider investment bankers as the best candidates for the top jobs in finance. But if Jes Staley is named the new chief executive of Barclays in the coming weeks, it will be more proof that despite all the banker-bashing of recent years, investment bankers are still highly regarded among their peers.

There are now plenty of them in the upper echelons of Europe's banks. Stuart Gulliver has held the chief executive role at HSBC since 2011, having run its global banking and markets business before that. Bill Winters, Staley's predecessor as head of investment banking at JP Morgan, has been running the show at Standard Chartered since June.