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LATEST ARTICLES
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JPMorgan recorded a hat-trick in the liquidity rankings, but it was all change in many other areas of this year’s Euromoney FX poll.
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Equity Bank has been involved in healthcare provision in Kenya since 2015, when it established Equity Afia as an integrated, scalable and sustainable healthcare delivery model through its nonprofit foundation.
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As the Middle East enters a new phase of development, one in which governments can no longer rely on endless petrodollars and in which economies built on global trade and travel will have to adapt to survive, it will need banks with outstanding M&A and advisory capabilities. Citi is such a bank.
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When the Covid-19 pandemic reached Qatar and foreign exchange houses were forced to close, a customer contacted Commercial Bank of Qatar (CB) with concerns that his domestic workers were no longer able to send critical remittance payments to families in their home countries.
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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.
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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.
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Few banks have undergone as great a transformation over the last four years as PrivatBank. In December 2016, when it was taken over by the state, Ukraine’s biggest bank held more than a third of the country’s retail deposits and boasted 20 million customers.
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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.
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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.
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Singapore’s banks have dominated this award in recent years and for good reason. The super-stable city state boasts a trio of excellent lenders, all geared toward helping its army of small and medium-sized enterprises flourish.
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As the biggest retail bank in a country where cash usage is lower than other big European states and where cloud-based neobanks have particular traction, Lloyds Banking Group faces an unusual digital banking challenge.
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The pandemic and following market crisis during 2020 has seen many high net-worth individuals across central and eastern Europe return to the safety and security of large international banks. Among those benefiting from this flight to safety has been Credit Suisse, which has seen increases in net new assets over the first few months of the year.
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Morgan Stanley rarely seems to put a foot wrong in Asia. As ever, it seemed to be everywhere last year, a key player on the deals that mattered most.
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“This pandemic will change a lot of things in terms of how people approach crises in the future,” Martin Mugambi, Citi’s chief executive for Kenya and east Africa, tells Euromoney.
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Kenya’s Equity Bank stands out as a modern financial institution, a domestic champion and a regional player. As a result, it receives this year’s award for Africa’s best bank.
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Credit Suisse wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for wealth management.
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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.
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Standard Bank’s investment in switching its trade processes from manual to digital has paid off this year, with faster processes stemming from better technology. It is the best bank for transaction services in Africa as a result. Its head of transactional products and services is Hasan Khan.
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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.
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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.
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Bank of America is the undisputed leader in transaction services in North America. Long before the coronavirus crisis struck its home market, the bank had entered the Euromoney awards period with strong momentum. But by the end of that period it was being called upon to deploy all its leadership to help businesses across the US.
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Clients of transactions services want simplicity and speed, neither of which is easy for companies operating in regulatory cumbersome and often tech-light jurisdictions of Latin America.
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The best bank for financing in the region is Goldman Sachs.
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When Euromoney met the head of retail banking at Ping An Bank, Xinfa Cai, in September 2019, he talked of his desire to hear his employer mentioned, in terms of its dedication to innovation and service, in the same breath as the likes Taobao and JD.com, two of China’s biggest and best digitally driven corporates.
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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.
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HSBC retains its title as the Middle East’s best bank for transaction services for the second year running by stepping up to the challenge of helping customers trade and transact at a time of closed borders and supply-chain disruption.
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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.
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The vital role for UK corporate clients played by Barclays was clearer than ever during the coronavirus crisis: the bank arranged £9.9 billion of commercial paper issuance under the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility, almost half of the total.
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The Middle East is a hard market in which to be truly sustainable, given the vast amount of money in the region that is tied to oil now and will be for some time.
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Tight labour markets and low interest rates put a floor under credit demand across central and eastern Europe last year and mitigated the effects on banking sectors of slowing economic growth, regulatory curbs on consumer lending and proliferating sectoral levies.
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Banking is evolving in Saudi Arabia – the Gulf’s largest economy – with government and regulatory initiatives boosting growth in the sector.
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Over the past decade Poland’s banks have consistently been at the head of the pack in Europe in terms of digitalization.
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Center-Invest Bank became the first Russian bank to issue a green bond with its R250 million ($3.56 million) offering in November last year. It was a natural step for a bank that has been committed to the environment and responsible banking from its inception.
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When a big US bank joins its peers around the world under an umbrella of responsible banking, it lifts the entire responsibility agenda – and this is exactly what Citi has done as an early signatory to the Principles of Responsible Banking (PRB) of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative.
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In November 2019, AbbVie priced a $30 billion, 10-tranche bond that was the fourth-largest corporate bond ever. The trade, which backed AbbVie’s acquisition of Allergan, wrapped up an extraordinary financing package by Morgan Stanley.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the move towards cashless economies as governments advise against the use of cash because of its role as a vector for the virus. That has left many financial institutions scrambling to upgrade their systems.
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Societe Generale has long been active in promoting finance for small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa.
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“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.
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Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are the backbone of the Nigerian economy. A survey carried out in 2018 by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics estimated there are over 41 million firms with 199 employees or fewer in Nigeria, accounting for almost 50% of GDP. MSMEs provide almost 60 million jobs, equal to 86% of the national workforce.
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With Africa and the world expected to enter a protracted period of low growth, more companies will need to restructure and M&A will become a more dominant trend in the region. Over the last 12 months, Citi has demonstrated its expertise in these fields in Africa and it is Euromoney’s best bank for advisory in Africa this year.
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Western Europe’s best investment bank, BNP Paribas, is increasingly central to capital markets across the continent. That’s been particularly clear since the onset of the coronavirus crisis.
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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.
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Cyprus’s strict approach to tackling the coronavirus has meant the health crisis has been much less severe there than in many other states in Europe.
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Banking small and medium-sized enterprises is challenging in any market, particularly at the smaller end of the scale. It is even more so in Turkey, where the market is distorted by the predominance of large state-owned banks focused more on pumping up the economy with cheap credit than on commercial imperatives.
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“During the first quarter our assets increased by 15% due to net new money, transaction revenues are up year over year 55%, our lending share has grown 25% compared to a year ago and our costs are down 1%,” says Ali Janoudi, head of Middle East and Africa for wealth management at UBS.
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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.
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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.
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Businesses and banks in Belarus have faced a particularly tough challenge during the Covid-19 crisis due to the refusal of the government not only to impose any national restrictions but also to acknowledge the risks of the pandemic and implement any measures to mitigate its economic impact.
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A great deal of resources have been dedicated to small and medium enterprises in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom looks to increase SME’s contribution to GDP from 20% to 35% under its Vision 2030 programme.
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Santander is Latin America’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises. Many banks have SME offerings but few, if any, use the segment so effectively as one of the fundamental drivers of its growth.
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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.
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HSBC has been central to maintaining imports of vital goods into the region, even while national borders slammed shut.
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One of the first things Nigeria’s Guaranty Trust Bank did with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic was to get in touch with local authorities to see how the bank could help. Recognizing that the fragile public healthcare system would struggle to cope with the predicted number of patients, it offered to set up a care facility for people with Covid-19.
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Banreservas responded to the national state of emergency brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic by working closely with the Dominican Republic’s authorities and the central bank to keep the banking system liquid and avoid corporate insolvencies.
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Emirates NBD has excelled in all elements of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, from steps taken to protect the health of its employees to loan deferrals for its customers; but what really stands out is the bank’s commitment to its community.
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There’s practically nothing that a North American small to medium-sized enterprise might want to do that Bank of America won’t be able to help with. Its strategy, built around six service areas, has been enduringly constant for five years, and it again wins the award for North America’s best bank for SMEs.
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The list of deals from 2019 and 2020 – green bonds, social bonds, sustainability bonds and ESG-linked loans – goes on and on for HSBC in Asia under Jonathan Drew, managing director, sustainable finance.
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Santander has been one of the most innovative groups in the world in its response to the Covid-19 outbreak, and its Polish subsidiary is no exception.
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Year after year, HSBC quietly gets on with the key business of delivering crucial funding to clients whether they are looking to refinance debt, acquire an asset or rival, or just bulk up their balance sheet in the face of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.
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This year Vision Banco wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for corporate responsibility.