and today over the web. Over the years, prime brokers have expanded their product and service offerings to include some or all of the full range of fixed income and derivative products, as well as foreign exchange and futures products. As hedge funds proliferated globally through the 1990s and the 2000s, prime brokerage became an increasingly competitive field and an important contributor to the overall profitability of the investment banking business. As of 2006, the most successful investment banks each report over US$2 billion in annual revenue directly attributed to their prime brokerage operations (source: 2006 annual reports of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs). Financial crisis of 2007–08 The financial crisis of 2007–2008 brought substantial change to the marketplace for prime brokerage services, as numerous brokers and banks restructured, and customers, worried about their credit risk to their prime brokers, sought to diversify their counter-party exposure away from many of their historic sole or dual prime broker relationships. Restructuring transactions in 2008 included the absorption of Bear Stearns into JP Morgan, the acquisition of the assets of Lehman Brothers in the US by Barclays, the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, and the acquisition of certain Lehman Brothers assets in Europe and Asia by Nomura. Counter-party diversification saw the largest flows of client assets out of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs (the two firms who had historically had the largest share of the business, and therefore had the most exposure to the diversification process), and into firms which were perceived, at the time, to be the most creditworthy. The banks which captured these flows to the greatest degree were Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, and Deutsche Bank. During these market changes, HSBC launched a prime brokerage business in 2009 called "HSBC Prime Services", which built its prime brokerage platform out of its custody business. Counterparty risks The prime brokerage landscape has dramatically changed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Hedge funds who received margin financing from Lehman Brothers could not withdraw their collateral when Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to a lack of asset protection rules (such as 15c3 in the United States) in the United Kingdom. This was one of many factors that led to the massive deleveraging of capital markets during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Upon Lehman's collapse, investors realized that no prime broker was too big to fail and