Acquisitions over the past 18 months, ranging from commodity trading to funds management and securities brokerage, have been aimed at moving the investment bank away from its traditional specialist infrastructure-fund model, which powered it during the boom times but proved cumbersome when debt markets closed off. Brokerage RBS has become the latest to trim its earnings outlook for Macquarie, slicing 7 per cent from its forecasts for this year and a further 5 per cent for next year. But RBS analyst Michael Leonard said the investment bank should get a boost over time from recent acquisitions, while infrastructure asset write-downs, a feature of recent results, were unlikely in the near term.