The London-headquartered lender has its roots and its future in Asia, and from the outset it was keen to provide staunch support to its customers across the region. It has been everywhere throughout the Covid-19 crisis, playing, in the words of chief executive Noel Quinn, a “massive role” in supporting communities and helping restore economic growth.

Canada’s biggest bank is a regular winner of the award for Canada’s best investment bank, but in 2020 it has clocked up another accolade for the first time since 2004.

“I think this crisis has shown why being with a firm focused on wealth management as a primary business and having a global perspective matters to clients,” says Tom Naratil, co-chief executive of UBS global wealth management (GWM) and president of UBS Americas.

To succeed, you have to be national: for Bill Demchak, chief executive of PNC Financial Services, it’s the mantra that has guided his strategy since taking over the reins of the firm in 2013.

There is fierce competition in sustainable finance in Western Europe, but this year one bank stands out for its commitment across all the sectors and countries in which it operates and for its work on ensuring the needs of both environment and society are addressed.

Keeping supply chains functioning is essential for the success of CEE’s open, globally connected economies, and the banks best-placed to do so are those that combine deep local knowledge with international expertise.

Across sustainable finance and microfinance, BBVA is working to support greener and more inclusive economies. It wins the award for best bank in Latin America for sustainable finance.

The best digital bank award goes to Banco Inter, which has pulled off the difficult feat of keeping both its investors happy following its 2018 IPO – as it matures from a rapid growth story – and its clients.

Citi worked hard to mitigate the effects of the pandemic throughout central and Latin America and, given its history and geographical spread throughout the region, its impact was widespread.

While it was hard before, the Covid-19 pandemic will make it almost impossible for most European banks to earn their cost of equity any time soon.

Goldman Sachs’s first ever investor day in January 2020 might have left more questions than answers around the firm’s forays into the brave new worlds of consumer and transaction banking. But one thing was unshakeable – its investment bank franchise. This year it is our choice as the US’s best investment bank.

What CB Bank did right in the early days of Covid-19 was to recognize that the main pressure facing its customers was a shortage of cash.

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) developed its sustainability framework in 2017 under four pillars: sustainable banking, being a responsible employer, having a positive social impact and excellence in governance, integrity and risk management.

At a time of global economic retrenchment, dollar volatility, slowing trade flows and border closures, Africa needs deeper localization of markets and financing. Standard Bank’s expertise in these fields makes it the clear choice for best investment bank in Africa this year.

In September 2019 Garanti BBVA signed the world’s first gender loan, a newly designed structure that the bank hopes will encourage its customers to improve their gender equality performance.

As the sixth-largest bank in North America by branches, TD Bank Group penetrates deep into the Canadian and US markets. It deployed massive support to retail and corporate clients in both countries as the coronavirus crisis took hold.

It isn’t easy being a very big bank with a very big presence in very big markets. Citi is a big financial institution present in virtually every large Asian economy. You don’t get to be this size and to last this long without an innate ability to react smartly and nimbly to systemic threats.

The 2020 award for the best bank for advisory goes to BR Partners. It is an outstanding growth story: the investment bank boutique was opened just 10 years ago by founder and chief executive Ricardo Lacerda, previously of Citi and Goldman Sachs in Brazil.

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.

It was a year of milestones for Morgan Stanley in sustainability, a journey that began in 2013 with the establishment of the Sustainable Investing Institute under Audrey Choi, the bank’s chief sustainability officer.

Kenya’s Equity Bank stands out for its digital offering, and is poised to take advantage of the coronavirus-fuelled pivot towards cashless banking.

Another brisk year of M&A deal flow in CEE produced a clear winner on the advisory side. The best bank for advisory, Citi, dominated Dealogic’s league tables for the 12 months to the end of March, acting on 17 deals worth $17.7 billion, versus just $9.5 billion for its nearest rival.

Standard Chartered’s contribution to the development of African markets this year was shown in several transformational infrastructure deals, including Tanzania’s light railway and a huge offshore oil drilling rig in Angola. This contribution makes it Euromoney’s best bank for financing in Africa.

DBS takes the award for Asia’s best bank for transaction services this year.

Under the stewardship of chief executive Jean-Christophe Durand, formerly head of BNP Paribas’s Middle East and Africa operations, National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) embarked on a radical transformation programme in 2017 that delivered impressive results during the awards period.

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) play a unique role in the US, but they were not included in the earliest Covid-19 stimulus packages. So it was vital that big banks helped them to reach those that needed loans the most.

Banking is evolving in Saudi Arabia – the Gulf’s largest economy – with government and regulatory initiatives boosting growth in the sector.

Until the coronavirus crisis, it was a familiar year for RBC Capital Markets in the awards period. As usual, the bank faced strong individual competitors in almost every business, product or sector in which it operates, but no firm rivals it across the board.

DBS is a bank at the top of its game. For the second year in a row, it not only wins the best bank in Asia award but canters away with it at high speed.

The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed many of the assumptions underpinning M&A deals under preparation before the outbreak. Therefore it has been vital for advisory banks to shift focus to help clients understand and manage the situation. Much of that is about having built up a well-rounded franchise.