And he probably would have, back in his rugby days. Snow, a former England B international who played as a second-row forward, now pushes his weight in a very different sort of scrum: the tussle to build Britain’s premier investment bank aimed at smaller and mid-cap firms.

This week the figures reported by his Evolution group will show just how far he has got. The group, which Snow set up with his rugby-playing chum Richard Griffiths four years ago, runs two former stockbrokers, Beeson Gregory — rechristened Evolution Securities — and private-client firm Christows, both one-time loss-makers that are now growing rapidly.

On the back of that turnround, Snow and Griffiths, chief executive and chairman respectively, have come from nowhere to be lauded as among the most successful value- creators operating in the City.

That, however, tells only half the story. Snow, 35, is an Old Harrovian and impeccably well connected in the Square Mile — his uncle was Lord Hambro. Griffiths, 38, a former scrum-half, is the son of a Welsh sheep farmer. How has this unlikely pairing been so successful so quickly?

“I don’t know,” grins Snow, shifting his huge frame in a tiny chair in Evolution’s ninth-floor City offices. “We came to this without a manual and I guess we’ve been doing it by total intuition — certainly in the early days I didn’t sleep for months with worry. But eventually you just find your feet.”

Such self-deprecation is characteristic of Snow, who mixes sober civility with a bluntly aggressive drive more readily found on the rugby pitch.

And he is the first to admit that timing, luck and a love of risk have played equal parts in his business success. Five years ago Snow chucked in a good job selling equities at CSFB and “went liquid” — selling house, shares and car — in expectation of a downturn. He was also looking for a new challenge.

He went straight to the tech incubator fund Evestment, which had £40m to spend on start-ups just as that sector’s balloon had burst. Snow switched its aim to financial services, hoping to identify bargains as the markets went south.

Five years later that strategy has proved prescient. Snow picked up Christows, merged it with Griffiths’s Evolution investment vehicle, snapped up Beeson Gregory the next year, slashed costs and relaunched both businesses as part of the new Evolution Group plc, along with tech investments such as its interest, now sold, in the intellectual-property group IP2IPO.

By 2003 Evolution had moved from AIM to the main market. Today its market value of £421m and likely cash pile of more than £150m make it one of the fastest-growing businesses in the City.

More tellingly, Snow has pitched Evolution Securities as a “best-of-breed integrated investment bank”, positioning it to fill the void left when the global banks decided that mid-size clients weren’t worth the effort.

“We are an entrepreneurial company. We’ve built this by grabbing opportunities and restructuring the firms, and we are immeasurably well positioned to advise clients similar to us because we have had that experience and we can help them with their strategy.”

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