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.

No matter where head office is based, Euromoney’s best regional bank, HSBC, is fundamentally about Asia. In 2016, the region contributed $10.6 billion out of global profit before tax of $17.3 billion – two thirds of the pie.

World's best bank

It might not have the same level of market presence across North America as some of its international competitors, but HSBC’s push forward in the region over the last 12 months has secured it Euromoney’s award for North America’s best bank for transaction services.

Euromoney challenges Stuart Gulliver over his active management of the HSBC portfolio and why he has not exited retail banking in more countries, given that retail banking is a scale business, which HSBC lacks everywhere outside Hong Kong and the UK.

Financing, and particularly debt, is one area where European investment banks can still have a grip on their home markets. Many are already reaping the benefits of having shifted to a more capital-efficient deployment of their balance sheets.

Citi is perhaps the only global markets business remaining that shows that scale and breadth – both geographically and by product – can deliver good returns.

The bank’s expertise in debt capital markets and transaction banking have helped it excel in emerging markets this year.

Julius Baer’s strategy of commitment, investment and hiring – when many of its peers have been retreating – has enabled the bank to become a global leader in wealth management.

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.

Stuart Gulliver’s six-year transformation of HSBC has created a global bank that works, rather than one that merely exists. And through that process, the bank has continued to deliver impressive returns.

Solving the challenge of the world’s unbanked is going to take investment, innovation, and an ability to bring together key players in payments, fintech and microfinance. No bank is quite as committed to that combination as Citi.

The bank has demonstrated exceptional on-the-ground commitment and understanding of its clients across all regions.

The French bank is firmly in expansion mode in corporate banking, on a much more global level than you might expect, and fully grasping how to serve their clients digitally.

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.

As Stuart Gulliver’s time as chief executive of HSBC runs down, the moment has come to acknowledge his achievement in managing the remarkable transformation of one of the world’s biggest, most complex banks. Once a diffuse portfolio of unconnected banking franchises, it now starts to look much more like the jewel it should be: a properly managed network that can serve customers and reward shareholders by handling global trade and capital flows.

Citi aims to develop new banking apps with the speed of a Silicon Valley startup and deliver them across a vast incumbent bank.

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.

Transaction services clients are increasingly well served in the Middle East, particularly in the UAE’s relatively large financial services industry. Local banks have improved their offering, while the biggest international banks also see it as a priority.

The region’s investment banking market, as ever, remains more tilted to the Gulf, which has recently been less active in blockbuster sovereign wealth-fund M&A mandates and more vigorous in public-sector financing as the lower oil price has bitten.

It was a year of some relief for Middle East banking, as the benefits of reform began to be felt and the oil price recovered. Although they remain partly at the mercy of Opec and the US shale energy industry, there was good news for local and international banks, as the government spending crunch eased up and the region turned to international markets to finance its development projects and budget deficits.

It is tough to create a franchise in global finance, but over the last five years Christian Meissner has mixed a potent cocktail at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s global corporate and investment bank. Can it build its relationships with key clients to the point where it becomes a true challenger to JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs?

It started out as one of 3,000 peer-to-peer lenders in China. In six years, it has become a broad wealth management platform that may raise as much as $5 billion in an international IPO this year. The pace of its growth has been every bit as breathtaking as Tencent’s WeChat or Alibaba’s Alipay, yet few outside China have heard of it. They will. CEO Gregory Gibb tells us why.

Hiring more than anyone else in the wealth management industry and hoovering up the assets of failing competitors, Julius Baer is going head-to-head with its two larger Swiss competitors in Asia and Europe. Given CEO Boris Collardi’s tenacity, if the markets go his way, he may just pull it off.

Frédéric Oudéa has been CEO of Société Générale for longer than any other current head of a leading European bank. His success in bringing the bank through the financial crisis and its aftermath is widely acknowledged. But can he articulate a convincing vision of SocGen’s future?

At the largest private-sector investment firm in the Persian Gulf, the line between business and politics has always been blurred – its well-connected new executive chairman Mohammed bin Mahfoodh Al Ardhi seems a perfect fit for that curious tradition.

Citi's new mobile app is a first crucial step to re-invention. Head of consumer banking, Stephen Bird, tells Euromoney the bank may have only a couple of years to convince customers it is the high-quality, always-connected partner with the services they want.

Results index Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS, is a great believer in the threat to banking from platforms like Ant Financial, and in the opportunity available for those who get ahead of the game. Gupta has invested S$4.6 billion in digital strategies in the last five years. He has also insisted that everyone in his team buy in to the vision, arguing that it is much easier to effect change if 22,000 staff believe in it than to try to drive it from the top down.

Results index Five years ago, Citi’s global transaction services business launched an innovation lab in Singapore, in a business park out by Changi Airport. At first it felt like a gimmick, but has considered hundreds of ideas since and put 80 to prototype.