If there is one thing that will test a bank’s digital and technology platform it is a global pandemic. The investment that Bank of America has put into all of its digital offerings over the last few years became truly apparent over the first few months of 2020; and it wins the award for North America’s best digital bank.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

HSBC has been central to maintaining imports of vital goods into the region, even while national borders slammed shut.

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.

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.

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.

As of late June 2020, Citi, together with its charitable Citi Foundation, had committed some $100 million to Covid-19 relief efforts. While the targets of its aid are varied, the bank has made a special focus on supporting people and communities of colour, recognizing the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on these communities.

Over the past decade Poland’s banks have consistently been at the head of the pack in Europe in terms of digitalization.

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.

In a transformative year for capital markets in the Middle East, HSBC stands out as the region’s best investment bank, reclaiming the title it last won in 2017.

Credit Suisse wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for wealth management.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As you’d expect from ING, Euromoney’s best bank for transaction services in Western Europe, technological innovation a plays a central role in its wholesale banking offering.

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.

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.

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.

When Singapore suffered a second spike in coronavirus cases in April, attention turned to the city state’s migrant labourers, an army of essential workers described by a former head of the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health as society’s “most invisible” members.

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.

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.

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

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.

Latin America’s best bank this year is BBVA. The Spanish-headquartered bank has long been vulnerable to competitors’ claims that it was more a federation than an integrated network of subsidiaries, but the bank’s most recent performance shows that the management – overseen by Jorge Sáenz-Azcúnaga, head of country monitoring at BBVA – has addressed this weakness.

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.