Collating data across 25 global institutions is difficult because of reporting differences. As a group, the US banks are without doubt the clearest, even if Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs eschew the convenience of long quarterly time-series in favour of showing comparisons with just the previous quarter and the year-ago period.
Next up come Deutsche Bank and UBS, with spreadsheets of impeccable clarity stretching back seven quarters in the case of Deutsche and a remarkable 15 in the case of UBS. Credit Suisse is nearly as good, but lets itself down in the impenetrable way it organises its region/business matrix.
At least it now also groups together its revenue by activity: until fairly recently anyone wanting to come up with a rough idea of the firm’s total corporate and investment banking-related revenues would have to look in at least five different places.
Barclays doesn’t break out as much investment bank detail as all of those firms, sharing a tendency with the French banks to lump things together as ‘banking’ or some other equally unhelpful grouping. At least it reports most items on a quarterly basis these days: Standard Chartered still only gives the most cursory information at the end of the first and third quarters.