Morgan Stanley may have missed out on the investment bank title for only the second time in five years, but it remains formidable and was pre-eminent in equity capital markets during our review period. It is a deserving winner of Euromoney’s best bank for financing.

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Deutsche Bank’s failure of the recent Federal Reserve stress tests drew attention, but while the regulator was happy to kick the battered European bank while it is down, this was in stark contrast to its treatment of favoured home-town players Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley was an early adopter in using technology to better serve its wealth management clients – and to improve revenues. The bank’s wealth management unit notched a record $1.16 billion in profits during the first three months of this year, up 1% from the fourth quarter and up 19% from a year earlier. Client assets grew 8% from a year earlier to $2.4 trillion, earning it the award for North America’s best bank for wealth management.

Morgan Stanley’s journey to the very top of US investment banking has been built on a fairly simple principle: to give the best advice and execution to its clients. There will be few firms that do not claim to have a similar ambition, but the difference at Morgan Stanley, under president Colm Kelleher, is just how much of the business is set up and run with precisely these objectives in mind.

The US firm is now the top non-universal bank in global sales and trading – a remarkable turnaround in a business that was struggling just five years ago

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Its global reach and focus have paid off and Morgan Stanley has been busy across the piste in FIG this year.

Bank of America and Citi win top prizes; Credit Suisse’s Tidjane Thiam is named Banker of the Year; Asian banks make their mark in global awards.

Some banks make a virtue of being able to coordinate big balance sheet commitments quickly while also offering a broad product suite. Others have, by necessity, a more selective approach to capital commitment but excel in the advisory work that fosters a strategic partnership with a client, as well as leading to key roles in capital markets transactions. Morgan Stanley is an example of the latter and is North America’s best bank for advisory.

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While tax reform charges make a bad year worse for US banks, the timing of the law sets the scene for better results in 2018. But the fundamentals may not change: trading is bad, financing is good.

Banks are booking big charges in the fourth quarter, but the domestic names are sitting pretty for the future as US taxes fall.

US firm is firing on all cylinders - even if its returns are nothing to write home about

Several trends emerge from the year-to-date league tables, and not everyone will like them.

Delegates at this year’s IMF/World Bank meetings are managing to look beyond macro concerns to present a more upbeat tone.

A decade after the great panic of August 2007, a harbinger of the global financial crisis that followed, Euromoney brings together chief executives of three firms almost brought down by the credit crunch. We ask them to share their recollections of that time, discuss key lessons learned and debate the likelihood of a new crisis, the banking industry’s ability to withstand it and how to improve regulation.

Morgan Stanley dominated M&A league tables during our review period, but winning the best bank for advisory award is about more than scale. What is more impressive is the way Morgan Stanley has put itself at the heart of the central trends of Asia-Pacific M&A, usually getting itself on to the lucrative sell side along the way.

The best investment bank in Asia awards was one of the easier ones to decide upon. Morgan Stanley had an outstanding year in advisory and equity capital markets, and held its own in debt.

Euromoney has never before given an award in Afghanistan, but the story of Azizi Bank is compelling. Formed by an ethnic business group in 2006 and owned by Dubai’s Azizi Group, it took over the Development Bank of Afghanistan from the central bank in 2009, then India’s Punjab National Bank in 2014. It is Afghanistan’s largest commercial bank, with more than 140 branches and a million customers, and employs 2,300 people, 17% of them women, which does not sound a lot but matters in Afghanistan.

When it comes to corporate and social responsibility, few banks are prepared to be consistently the first to advocate for the environment and for human rights the way Morgan Stanley does.

A seventh year of record earnings in the fiscal period 2016 – and a first half of 2017 that promises another blockbuster year – saw TD Bank prove yet again that it is the franchise to beat in Canada. The firm’s unrivalled breadth and depth secure it Euromoney’s best bank in Canada award for another year.

Whatever clients need to do, it is a fair bet that Morgan Stanley can help them do it. The firm’s business this year in North America was no exception, and while from a league table perspective it is in M&A advisory that Morgan Stanley truly excels, its innovation and skill in all areas make it our choice for best investment bank in the US. Morgan Stanley likes uncertain markets more than some – it reckons volatile conditions are when it can best show its prowess. Nowhere was this shown better than in the unregistered block trade that the bank executed on behalf of Abbott Laboratories, which wanted to sell 44 million shares of Mylan in what was the second largest unregistered block ever.

Euromoney names HSBC as the World’s Best Bank and Morgan Stanley as the World’s Best Investment Bank; UniCredit’s chief executive Jean Pierre Mustier wins Banker of the Year award.

The revival of its markets, as well as momentum in its traditional investment-banking strengths, has made Morgan Stanley stand out from its competitors over the review period.

Investment bankers in Europe describe Unilever as one of the most sophisticated users of investment banks in the world. “They know all of our strengths and all of our weaknesses,” says one banker who has covered the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate for many years.

The investment bank has come through more than a decade of difficulties to become the momentum firm on Wall Street once again. The last piece of the puzzle, making its fixed income business fit for purpose, is now in place. Morgan Stanley is working together as a firm better than ever before. Its people have their swagger back. And the architects of this renaissance are determined to press home their advantage with a ruthless approach to deploying the firm’s capital – both financial and human.

The revival of a franchise is always a compelling story and nowhere has it been more evident than in Morgan Stanley’s markets business. For its dramatic turnaround in fixed income trading, coupled with its continued equities leadership, the bank is North America’s best bank for markets.

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Goldman Sachs badly underperformed other US banks in first-quarter fixed income results, setting off a frenzy of speculation about trading positions that could have led to the disappointment.