It’s hard to find a more comprehensive and cutting-edge offering in wealth management across Africa than that of Standard Bank, which is why the bank wins the award for best bank for wealth management in Africa once again.

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.

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.

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.

Societe Generale’s footprint in CEE has changed dramatically over the last four years. At the start of 2016, the French group had one of the largest banking networks in the region, covering 13 countries from Albania to Georgia.

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.

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.

BNP Paribas has sustainability and inclusiveness at its heart, as shown in its approach to all of its stakeholders. This year the bank wins the award for the region’s best bank for corporate responsibility.

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.

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.

To the detractors of big Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs might not seem an obvious candidate for recognition of its response to a humanitarian crisis. But when the Covid-19 crisis struck, the bank rapidly deployed a raft of measures spanning frontline support for hospitals to online versions of its community volunteering programmes.

Citi has the largest presence of any global bank in Africa – active in over 40 countries, with offices in 16 of those. The bank excels at capacity building and innovation, working with a vast array of partnerships with government, government agencies, fintechs, local financial institutions, consumer goods companies, social enterprises and nonprofits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a region where the greatest amount of wealth is in the hands of entrepreneurs, it is a ‘bank for entrepreneurs’ that many of those wealthy individuals need and that is Credit Suisse. It wins the award this year for Asia’s best bank for wealth management.

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.

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.

“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.

After years of pullback from emerging markets by big Western banks, only two players can now claim to offer truly comprehensive investment banking coverage in CEE.

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.

This year Vision Banco wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for corporate responsibility.

After much restructuring in 2019 that saw the de-layering of management, regionalization of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and streamlining of client segments, it wasn’t clear what the beginning of 2020 might look like for UBS in Western Europe.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.