This time last year, Euromoney recognized progress at Deutsche Bank as the best transformation story of 2020. Twelve months on, the German lender might be getting its act together at last. Can it sustain its recovery?

Two years ago, Deutsche pulled back in ECM. Now, in Asia, it wants back in.

In September, the EU will issue bills through the auction system operated by the Banque de France for the French Trésor. But they will not immediately be a reference safe asset for European capital markets.

A new anti-money laundering centre housed in the Baltic state’s central bank is growing and hiring fast. It aims to turn Lithuania into an AML hub – and to address and reverse the region’s questionable reputation.

ESG issues are part of the package with emerging market sovereign bonds.

As fintechs approach 10% of the banking and payments universe, the pioneer venture investor and founder of Capital One says banks must learn to partner with them or begin to lose ground.

David Wildermuth, the new chief risk officer at Credit Suisse, may have much of the heavy lifting done by the time he arrives at his desk in Zurich.

It is the deal everyone was waiting for – but UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel has to appear guarded, as he enters exclusive negotiations with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.

Recent reports concerning a payment made by Deutsche Bank to Europe’s largest winery are a reminder that disputes over FX derivatives mis-selling have yet to run their course.

The Swiss bank claims a resilient performance lies beneath the meagre returns after de-risking post-Archegos and Greensill, but big questions remain.

More focus on keeping a client happy than keeping the bank solvent; a risk management department that wasn’t tough enough and enabled bad practice; a willful reduction in margin; and two co-heads who each believed the other ran the relevant business. The report into Credit Suisse’s Archegos debacle makes grim reading.

The big question remains when governments will return to fiscal consolidation. How will NPLs fare when taxpayer support is withdrawn is also in doubt.

Barclays wants to be compared with the big five US investment banks. So let’s do that.

With investors already struggling to generate positive yields on most money market funds, managers are concerned that proposed legislative changes could render some funds unviable.

The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) is spurring talk of growth at Greek banks. But for their investors, it’s still all about last decade’s legacy.

The $33 billion valuation in neobank Revolut’s latest funding round puts it in the same league as lenders with trillions of assets and billions in profit.

Banks are slowly realising the commercial promise of data and data analytics products, but there is still a long way to go for many institutions to move beyond services that deliver limited business insight.

As Covid cases surge, the widespread hope that economic growth will contain defaults and banks will emerge unscathed looks optimistic.

Despite concerns over recent regulatory changes, synthetic risk transfers remain a key driver for business lending in markets where private investment is underdeveloped.

A barnstorming year in primary equity markets and M&A advisory, combined with consistent and comprehensive debt capital markets coverage, earn Citi the award for the region’s best investment bank.

The region's best banks, country by country

Many banks could press strong claims to be western Europe’s best investment bank for the first year of Covid – when all issuers desperately needed financing, corporations and sovereigns sought strategic advice and investors required ideas and liquidity to rapidly adjust market exposures.

Sustainable finance is rapidly gaining traction in the Turkish banking sector, with Akbank, Isbank, Vakifbank and Ziraat Bank all issuing ESG-labelled bonds in the year to the end of March.

UBS performed strongly again in Euromoney’s global private banking and wealth management survey in 2021. It topped the western Europe regional rankings for: best private banking services overall; serving mega high net-worth clients worth more than $250 million; family offices; business owners; and high net-worth clients with $5 million to $30 million to invest.

As well as winning the best bank and best bank for financing awards, BNP Paribas is also western Europe’s best bank for sustainable finance.

It’s not often any bank sits above JPMorgan in an important financing league table, but BNP Paribas far outstrips the US bank as a bookrunner both of syndicated loans and of debt capital markets deals for borrowers in western Europe.

An unrivalled regional network presence, commitment to innovation and consistent support for clients during the pandemic earn Citi the award for CEE’s best bank for transaction services.

In a bumper year for Eurobond issuance, JPMorgan once again demonstrated the unrivalled breadth and depth of its debt capital markets franchise in central and eastern Europe.

Although the biggest universal banks regularly appear higher up the M&A advisory league tables by transaction value, Rothschild & Co works on far more deals than any competitor. According to Dealogic it advised on 222 deals in the 12 months under review compared with Goldman Sachs’s 132.

Amid the scramble for cash during the pandemic lockdowns, efficient treasury management was key to ensuring that companies made the most of the liquidity already available to them, minimizing the need for, and cost of, emergency measures. Corporates looked to free up otherwise trapped liquidity through techniques such as cash pooling, either through physical sweeping or – as the imperative to go digital mounts – through virtual accounts.