Latin America's best investment bank 2020: JPMorgan

This year the region’s best investment bank is JPMorgan. In a highly competitive year, the US bank claims the award because of the unrivalled breadth of its mandates across investment banking products, as well as its dominance in many of the region’s countries.

Importantly JPMorgan can point to credibility beyond volume: the bank demonstrated leadership and innovation across many of the standout deals in Latin America.

According to Martin Marron, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Latin America and Canada, and head of investment banking and private banking for Latin America, this combination of breadth and depth is due to the bank’s ability to “optimize the benefits of capillarity and execution expertise for the benefits of our clients.”

It is clearly working, and it is a difficult barrier to break for the competition, because the combination of geographical presence with the full spectrum of product capability is an expensive strategy to replicate inorganically.

Many of the investment banks that have tried to grow across the region through ambitious office openings and team hires have found this out to their cost when disappointing growth – due either to internal challenges or, more often than not in this region, macroeconomic collapse – lead to retrenchment and retreat.