BNP Paribas showcased meaningful growth in real estate, especially in its CEE operations.

The success of e-CNY, despite its retail characteristics, could be attributed to a strong government push, effective collaboration with banks and e-platforms, and, most importantly, a win-win mentality that inspired the two-tier channel design.

As HSBC retrenches from domestic business on the continent, BNP Paribas steps up its ambition in Europe’s biggest economy – focusing largely on the family-owned Mittelstand.

Buying Axa IM would be BNP Paribas chief executive Jean-Laurent Bonnafé’s biggest acquisition. It has been a long time in the making.

Political instability in France, coupled with better EU-UK relations, could threaten Paris’ ability to rival London as a financial centre. But a focus on institutional clients among French and other EU banks is already helping London’s resilience – a trend that shows little sign of abating.

The French bank has made steady progress in this business over the last decade and last year was a strong period of new mandates and client expansion.

The bank is leveraging all its resources to reach six million individuals by 2025. It is well on its way.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management operates across 17 countries, serving a client base of entrepreneurs, family offices and high net-worth individuals.

For a small economy, Luxembourg boasts many banks: 120 were authorized in 2023. Many of these primarily serve international clients, in particular providing securities services to institutional investors from across Europe and beyond.

BNP Paribas has enviable sustainable finance credentials globally, but Latin America has become a particular area of strength for the French bank. In 2023, it led on some truly landmark transactions for clients throughout the region and can claim to be leading the evolution of sustainable finance in Latin America.

The Belgian government’s retail bond programme last year, which pressured lenders to raise deposits, was just one element of a relatively tough environment for banks in Belgium. The country also sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to southern Europe in terms of the proportion of loans on floating-rate deals, meaning local banks benefit less from higher eurozone interest rates.

As the equity capital markets remained sluggish across Europe last year, financing activity was all about debt. So, it is perhaps no surprise that western Europe’s best bank for financing this year is the one that dominated the debt capital markets league tables working on 509 deals worth $128 billion equivalent for a 7% market share: BNP Paribas. Even in ECM, the French firm ranked number five behind sector leaders BofA Securities and Goldman Sachs.

It is not normally thought of as one of the banks with a large stronghold on central and eastern Europe. Nevertheless, BNP Paribas still owns relatively large banks in what are, in effect after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the region’s two biggest markets in terms of banking: Poland and Turkey.

French banks have not had the net interest margin bonanza that higher interest rates have offered many southern European banks recently. In fact, some French banks saw profit decreases in their domestic retail divisions last year, while areas like markets and vehicle leasing have been less of a support to group profit compared to the immediate post-pandemic period.

The region’s tough economic history, coupled with its strength in soft and hard commodities, makes it best positioned to tackle today’s challenges.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management has been named Western Europe's best private bank for sustainability this year. One of the many factors supporting this decision is the banks’ ability to embed sustainability into all its product and services by prioritising portfolio assessment and the upskilling of its bankers.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management shows “a strong dedication to enhancing the client experience through digital means, innovation and research”, according to the judging panel for this year’s private banking awards.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management’s philanthropy solutions have been a noteworthy part of its wider positive impact offering since 2008. The firm aims to provide clients, free of charge, with proposals that fit each step of their philanthropic journey.

BNP Paribas has been relentlessly fine-tuning its secondary equities business in Europe for more than a decade. While the primary focus has been on reaching an affordable offering for institutional investor customers of its markets business, clients of the wealth-management business are now also benefiting.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management operates across 17 countries, serving a client base of entrepreneurs, family offices and high net-worth individuals.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management has been named Euromoney’s best international private bank in the Middle East for 2024.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management has been named Asia’s best bank for discretionary portfolio management (DPM) this year in recognition of its adept navigation of market headwinds and steadfast focus on client-centric service.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management has been named Asia’s best private bank for sustainability 2024 in recognition of the firm's comprehensive approach to environmental, social and governance integration and its commendable track record of financial performance.

BNP Paribas Wealth Management is named Asia’s best private bank for digital solutions in 2024. This recognition comes on the back of a year that saw good digital growth and the implementation of a client-centric digital transformation strategy.

At a group level, BNP Paribas Wealth Management is a perpetual leader in the ever-growing field of sustainability. In 2023, Euromoney called the Paris-based lender the world’s best bank for sustainable finance for the third year in a row. We cited its status as the poster child for providing sustainable banking at scale, and its big and bold shift away from fossil fuels.

Boosting the role of corporate treasury by enabling it to centralize group-wide FX management may sound appealing, but implementation and cost challenges should not be underestimated.

Collaboration between national banks has seen widespread adoption of mobile payments schemes. The French and German-led approach of focusing on a single European scheme could therefore be seen as a distraction. But is it the only real way of keeping US payment companies at bay?

As a relative outsider, Slawomir Krupa might have appeared better suited to the chief executive job at Societe Generale precisely because it had done so badly under an establishment insider. BNP Paribas’ good performance, by contrast, would make the traditional background of its rumoured chief-executive-in-waiting, Marguerite Bérard, less of a barrier.

BNP Paribas leads from the front in its development of trading technology. Innovation is at the heart of the business, and the focus on technology and product rollouts has involved notable developments to its FX algo suite.

The evolution of ALiX is testimony to BNP Paribas’s commitment to innovation. Over the last four years this personal digital execution assistant has expanded to cover all available products in Cortex FX in one small widget that fits neatly in the corner of a client’s screen.