Turning around Britain's beleaguered banks has been no easy task - Lloyds' problems were so great that its chief executive, Antonio Horta Osorio, was famously signed off for exhaustion just six months after taking up the reins. However, it seems he is living up to his reputation of one of Europe's best bankers, and has good reason for feeling much better: Lloyds' underlying first quarter profit tripled to £1.5bn, lifting its shares to a two-year high and close to the government's breakeven level, which means dividends and re-privatisation could be on the way.
That will come as small comfort to the many shareholders who took a hefty hit when the government was forced to buy up 39 per cent of the group after somehow engineering a disastrous merger with HBOS. But there will be many others who will be celebrating a handsome profit having taken a punt on the idea that the government would do whatever it took to get the nationalised banks back in shape and off its balance sheet.
By the time you read this RBS will have also updated the market on its first quarter - like Lloyd's, RBS will receive a tailwind from falling bad debts and the gradual unwinding of the PPI scandal. But rebuilding the bank is proving a much harder slog, and Vince Cable's continued pursuit of prosecutions of the bank's formers directors provides a clue as to why Stephen Hester's job is proving somewhat more challenging than Mr Horta-Osorio's - Fred Goodwin's empire building.
It is somewhat ironic, then, that the brightest minds in banking today will make their names not, like Mr Goodwin, by building vastly complicated banks, but by dismantling them. They will earn their crust doing so, too, as the difficulties Lloyds has faced offloading a chunk of its branch network demonstrates. It's also worth remembering that much value has been created by breaking large businesses, perhaps more than by continually expanding them into unwieldy and impossible to manage monsters like RBS.
If the result is smaller and more focused banks, then that will be good news for all concerned. By their very nature they will have fewer moving parts and be easier to understand than the institutions they replace, and with a clearer, more socially responsible purpose - a bit like the Lloyds of old in fact. There is still much work to do, of course, before this becomes a reality. But progress so far suggests bank shares may soon become investments again rather than options on recovery.
