Granted, investment banking revenues, especially those in the Fixed Income Currencies and Commodities units, are often volatile and depend strongly on macroeconomic events. And, unfortunately for the banks though luckily for everyone else, an event on the scale of Brexit only happens once every decade.



Nonetheless, it's a lesson for bank investors and regulators alike: Investment banks are alive and kicking.



With banks under regulatory and market pressure to slash risk-weighted assets in their investment operations and some lenders like UBS pulling back almost entire from its FICC activities to free up regulatory capital, you wouldn't have been mistaken in thinking that European banks were all morphing into wealth managers with only ancillary investment banking operations.



While prop, derivatives and commodities trading may have been wound down in many places, other investment banking business like bond and currency trading, equity and debt capital markets and the advisory divisions are still in high demand.



The only slight problem is this: The European banks are not exactly at the top of the global investment banking game.



The five biggest European investment banks currently generate only half of what their U.S. peers are raking in, according to research by the Financial Times.