But I ultimately wanted to go back to what I enjoy doing most, which is advising clients on a broad scale.

The NYSE has a premium brand, one of the best known globally -- and companies that have premium brands trade at a premium to their sector. It's not surprising there would be a lot of demand.

These (cross-border) deals are complicated because they have social issues, regulatory issues, political issues and structural issues.

It's different from the old days in some sense. In the new model that at least we are building, it is not about one individual. It's about a team of very high-quality bankers.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.